Nearly all of Hollywood’s teenage heroes are white. These artists dreamed of something different.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, and pretty much everyone in a John Hughes movie, ever. Nearly all of our culture’s teenage movie heroes have been cast as white—even though the books that many of them originated in don’t identify their race. So a group of artists on Tumblr, tired of the whitewashing, decided that they would reimagine the cast of Harry Potter as people of color—and the results were, predictably, amazing.
A study released by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that of the top 100 grossing films of 2012, only 10.8 percent of speaking characters were black, 4.2 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Asian. That’s under 20 percent, in a nation where just over 60 percent of people identify as non-Hispanic whites. Representation matters—socially, emotionally, politically—which is why some of these Tumblr artists decided to take a stand. Take a look at some of their awesome work below.
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