reminder:
there is nothing wrong with feeling my emotions more deeply than those around me.
i am not too emotional.
i am not too much to handle.
i am sensitive.
i am allowed to feel.
i am allowed to be myself.
— k.e.
gingertodgers
In a Drarry chat today I saw someone ask if the Dursleys would really have reacted that strongly to Harry being mixed race or desi. Like, were people even likely to be that racist?
Yep, and I’ll tell you for why.
I grew up in a small UK village that was 100% white in the 90s. It wasn’t near London or any other big city and this was a time in the UK when everyone was obsessed with the idea that Pakistani immigrants were going to come over and steal jobs. Combine the way people talk about Muslims and EU immigrants in the UK today and that’s what we had. Pakistani was shortened into a slur and covered pretty much everyone from South East Asia. Indian, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, anyone with brown skin.
In 1997 an Indian family moved to the village. The oldest son was in my year and he had two younger sisters. Now keep in mind that this was a typical UK village, full of normalish people. They were educated at least to high school level, most of them had travelled abroad, they read the papers, some of them went to university, some of them went into the army, most of them worked in retail or industry.
Some things that happened (potential triggers for racism and bullying):
This is only the stuff that I, a white kid, saw and there were probably a million other moments that paralleled Harry’s experience with the Durselys.
Speaking of which: my mum’s family are the closest thing you’re going to find to the modern day Dursleys. They come from the same background, they live in a similar part of the country, they have the same kind of house, the same jobs, the same aspirations. And if I heard today, in 2017, that a mixed race child had come into their care I would genuinely worry. Like it’s not even a question of whether the Durselys would have been so horrible to a mixed race kid back in the 1997, they’d be that horrible in 2017.
So this is why the Dursley’s behaviour towards Harry backs up all the headcanons about Harry being mixed race. Saying that Britain was mainly white in the 90s does not mean that Potters of Colour didn’t exist, or that the Dursleys wouldn’t have been suuuuuuuper racist.
