Not My Canon!

The Text

As a reminder of the shaky ground the franchise was standing on in terms of diversity at this time, a certain statistic had been making the rounds again. Across the 8 films, only 6 minutes of dialogue were spoken by a person of color in nearly 20 hours of total runtime. So, yeah, casting "Black Hermione", as JKR put it, seemed to also be a good PR move. They just weren't expecting the fans to disagree based on canon. Let's check the text.

We've covered the bushy hair thing to death. And, to be clear, it was always described as brown, not black (which is typical for black women). Contrary to this was Hagrid's hair, which was listed as "bushy black" in the novels. Then there was the passage in PRISONER OF AZKABAN about Hermione's skin being "very brown" after visiting France (a particularly sunny climate in comparison) during the summer. But it was also mentioned numerous times that they were having a heat wave in the UK as well. Which is why, in the same sentence, Ron's skin was described as "incredibly freckly".

This example is, in a sense, a case of being lost in translation. "Very brown" is a reasonably common British turn of phrase to describe a suntan. I found some examples in a series by Enid Blyton, an English author who also wrote about a boarding school (albeit less magical).

"Hallo, Sally! How brown you are!"

Mary-Lou was at the deep end, watching the others. At least, she watched Darrell mostly, admiring the way she swam, cutting the water so cleanly with her strong brown arms, and thrusting through the waves like a small torpedo.

A pair of wicked eyes looked out of the window of a car, and a tuft of hair fell over a brown forehead. "I may have!" said Betty, stepping out.

There are many other examples of characters being "browned by the sun" or "sun browned". For that reason, a British author (JKR) describing her recently vacationed character as brown should not be considered an example of her normal skin tone, but a colloquial term for looking tanned after a holiday. Furthermore, this is confirmed in the Chambers Universal Learners' Dictionary.

Also, it would be strange to describe a dark-skinned character as "very brown" as a result of getting extra sun on her face. Not to get too scientific, but there is a biological aspect to this as well. People of color have more melanin in their skin, meaning their tans are often less noticeable. As well, you wouldn't commonly describe someone with a darker skin tone as "turning pink / pink-faced" when they are embarrassed, excited, overexerted, or cold, which is how Hermione is quite often described.