Excerpt from “#POC!Potter: An Analysis of Online Racial Meaning Reproduction in the Harry
Potter Series” by Ashley Holanda
In Wendy Chun’s essay on race as technology mentioned above, she explores the
production of racial meaning through the film Robot Stories, which explores the ways that
Asians and Asian-Americans have been dehumanized as robots through narratives of Asians with
or as robots themselves. The fact that Asian actors are portrayed navigating these elements of
stereotypes, rather than it being forced upon them, allows for the people themselves to create
their own meaning of their own race. They produce their race and racial meaning as a
technology. Wendy Chun emphasizes this by saying, “although the ideas and the experience of
race has been used for racist ends, the best way to fight racism might not be to deny the existence
of race, but to make race do different things” (57). Rather than taking on a multicultural view in
which a character’s race doesn’t matter, the character’s races are critically important in the
reproduction of racial meaning. It not only challenges whiteness by making the stories of POC
human and universal, but it creates representation for POC and allows them to navigate spaces
that are usually denied to them. It allows them agency and a chance to create meaning for
themselves and for people like them. This is displayed in a post written by user vondellswain,
whose artistic interpretations of Harry’s father as black, his mother as white, and Harry himself
as biracial, circulated around Tumblr. After receiving backlash from other fans for their
interpretations, they responded:
It is informed by my experience as the black mixed-race child of a black man and a white
woman…by my personal desire for a black mixed-race hero story. My desire to create
and disseminate content that involves non-white interpretations of popularly-imaginedwhite-by-default characters reflects my desire to speak to people like me, who are not
used to seeing faces like theirs represented in the popular media they consume....It
reflects my desire not to let blockbuster casting directors dictate what you may or may
not imagine the characters that populate your fiction to be...Squeeze representation out of
anywhere you can feel it and fabricate the rest. Own your fiction (2014).
In this way, race is produced consciously and deliberately for the purpose of penetrating false
consciousness and encouraging the reproduction of racial meaning in others. They encourage
others—most specifically youth of color—to do the same, to not be ashamed of their own
navigation, racial production, and to “own their fiction”. Thus, the authorship of the reader the
struggles of POC to create meaning, and to dismantle whiteness, all come together.