Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Wizarding is Whiter than Ever

Harry Potter fans been hype for this movie since word dropped that it was coming. A lot of us saw a golden opportunity in Fantastic Beasts, set to traverse the US instead of the UK: the chance to see ourselves in the Wizarding World. Fan casts of Newt Scamander, a character with no physical description, expressed the hopes of Potter heads of color everywhere. When Eddie Redmayne was cast as the magizoologist, we kept hope alive. As more casting was announced and the film remained white as a reddit forum, we kept hope alive. When Rowling released her problematic History of Magic in America and even worse History of Ilvermony, we kept hope alive. Because surely no one visits New York City, even in 1920, and only sees white people. Impossible. Well, Rowling always shoots for the exceptional in that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them gives us the toilet paper white New York City of Trump voters dreams. The New York that Friends sprung out of…yay… So yeah, those representation dreams are dead, so don’t go in expecting ANY of that.

Director David Yates and writer J.K. Rowling understand the world they’re playing in completely and thoroughly. And perhaps that’s where the main issue lies. Fantastic Beasts feels and looks the same as the last few films in the Harry Potter canon. 1920s Wizarding New York looks just like 1990s Wizarding London. New characters, a separation of 70 years, and a whole new country do little more than give us a few more vocabulary words and acronyms. …