Specifically the role and acts of Cho Chang.
The video is making the rounds in some circles.
Agree/disagree?
So far the Cho Chang name thing goes, her facts are off.
I haven’t seen the rest of the vid yet, but that bit’s been going around on Tumblr.
Anyone care to summarize the argument in a non-video form?
I do not want to sit through a video about this either, but I can’t imagine how there could be any valid grounds for thinking that the portrayal of Cho Chang is in any way racist. She is portrayed very sympathetically and no issue at all is made about her race by any of the story’s characters or by the author. The only significance of her being other than white is to underline the fact that ordinary racism is completely absent from the wizarding world (which has prejudice against muggles and mubloods instead), as evidenced by the fact that no one at all thinks anything of it that when she dates white boys such as Cedric and Harry. Harry also dates Parvati Patil (of a quite different Asian race, subject, in the real world, to quite differnt sorts of stereotyping) and no-one has any problem with that either. The worst that can be said about the character of Cho Chang and the other non-white students at Hogwarts is that they have been rather arbitrarily inserted into the story (in no case is anyone’s race of any significance to the plot) in order for the author to showcase her own lack of racism.
Is, perhaps, the complaint that Cho Chang is portrayed as too perfect, as too beautiful, sensible, and intelligent? Frankly, that one is well worth an eye roll even when it is implied that these positive characteristics are typical of East Asians,* but there is no implication in the Potter books that Cho Chang’s virtues are particularly typical of her race.
If someone is truly claiming that her portrayal is racist, they are either morons or trolls (or both).
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*Yes, that is technically racist, but if you have to suffer from racism (and, of course, we all do), that is definitely the sort you want to suffer from.
Chang can be Mandarin, definitely, but Cho cannot. Nor can it be Cantonese. Not sure about other Chinese dialects.
I can’t see that it matters whether the name Cho Chang is “real” Chinese or not. In the Potterverse, it seems that British wizarding families have a fondness for first names which sound silly, archaic, or pretentious (Quirinus, Remus, Draco, etc). There are several last names that sound rather goofy as well (Longbottom, Hufflepuff). It’s not unreasonable to assume that an ethnically-Chinese British witch may have a name that sounds a little “off” to a native Chinese person.
Rather like how eastern European names get ‘anglicised’ when people emigrate to western countries?
I grew up with a few "Hart"s that had been "Hardt"s a generarion earlier, and people who drop the “van” or “der” (or both) parts of their surname after a generation.
Edit, I know one German woman who goes by Renata on documents here, because no-one understands Renate is pronounced the same way in Germany.