{"id":219947,"date":"2016-06-05T15:51:39","date_gmt":"2016-06-05T15:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=219947"},"modified":"2016-06-05T15:51:39","modified_gmt":"2016-06-05T15:51:39","slug":"jk-rowling-attacks-black-hermione-racists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2016\/06\/jk-rowling-attacks-black-hermione-racists\/","title":{"rendered":"JK Rowling attacks black Hermione ‘racists’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Author JK Rowling has described people who criticised the casting of a black actress as Hermione in the new Harry Potter play as “a bunch of racists”.<\/p>\n
The Harry Potter creator told The Observer that she had “a great deal of difficulty with” their insistence that the character “must be a white woman”.<\/p>\n
Olivier winner Noma Dumezweni “was the best actress for the job,” she went on.<\/p>\n
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child begins previewing at London’s Palace Theatre on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The two-part production, written by Jack Thorne, is eagerly anticipated and expected to be one of the year’s biggest stage successes.<\/p>\n
Rowling said her “experience of social media” had led to her to expect “idiots were going to be [idiotic]” about Dumezweni’s casting.<\/p>\n
“But what can you say? That’s the way the world is,” she continued, adding she had “decided not to get too agitated” about the reaction online.<\/p>\n
Instead, she said, she had decided to “simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm.”<\/p>\n
In the same Observer article, director John Tiffany is quoted as saying he was “shocked [that] people couldn’t visualise a non-white person as the hero of a story”.<\/p>\n