AS A HISPANIC woman and a de facto mixed-race individual, I’m pretty invested in the idea of Hermione Granger, the former know-it-all-turned-ass-kicking heroine of the Harry Potter series, being mixed-race. I can’t think of a single character in mainstream media with whom I could identify on both an intellectual and emotional level—for I, too, was an obnoxious know-it-all for most of my adolescence, before I grew into myself. At 12, as I was beginning to carve my own identity out, she was the first strong female literary character I really sympathized with and admired; she was also fated to live happily ever after with one of the literary loves of my life, Ron Weasley.

I was always the only bookish brown girl in my class; coming from a mostly-white suburb in a mostly-white region of the United States, it wasn’t surprising, but it did make those pubescent years quite confusing. Like, why weren’t there any smart brown girls on TV? (Though when Angela came around to play the love of Shawn Hunter’s life on Boy Meets World, my heart had a little dance party inside my chest.) Is it okay that I’m interested in reading rather than… whatever it is that brown adolescents are supposed to be doing?

No one ever really talked about it on TV, unless it was to say “teen mother” (nonfiction) or “housekeeper” (fiction), two roles I never even wanted to consider playing in my own life. Reading books left me much less confused than visual media; the lack of visual cues and the wealth of imagination upon which I could draw meant I could easily picture myself in the shoes of any of the characters, Hermione or otherwise.

This seems to be the argument for writing Hermione as mixed-race in the online fanfiction community. Because J.K. Rowling never explicitly states her race (which she does with just about every nonwhite character in her universe), she could easily be anything, so long as her hair remains bushy. To be fair, she is very much a composite of J.K. Rowling herself, which leads us to believe that the author intended her to be white. But in the world of fanfiction, where authors provide their own interpretations of characters in every other respect, why not toy with race as well?

EVEN BEFORE OBAMA and the post-race myth, there had been a great deal of speculation on the Internet about Hermione’s race. When, in 2002, members of the Yahoo group “Harry Potter for Grownups” — decidedly not comprised of millennials, as we were still old enough to hope for a Hogwarts acceptance letter — discussed the issue, West Indian (in keeping with British ethnic demographics) ranked among the potential ethnic options.

For every member on Fictionalley who expressed disgust at the idea of Hermione not being white, there were several others elsewhere on the Internet who welcomed the possibility, even if they hadn’t entertained the idea before. After all, she is a marginalized character within the series; applying the physical attributes of certain marginalized populations in the Muggle world would not be too much of a stretch.

Now that the final set of movies is about to be released (and with it goes our childhood…), I can’t help but think about the implications for casting her as mixed-race in a Harry Potter movie. For one thing, it could kick-start a general people-of-color-in-the-mainstream-media trend–one that The Princess and the Frog and The Karate Kid reboot could have started, but surprisingly haven’t yet done. Then again, we still might not even be ready for our beloved white heroes and heroines to make room in the mainstream for nonwhite ones.

As recently as last fall, Community actor Donald Glover endorsed a campaign (begat by Twitter) to get him an audition for the role of Spiderman. (In the film industry, casting calls are typically very specific about physical type, hence the need for a campaign to get a black actor an audition.) The reaction, as documented on io9, was far from post-racial, as one by one, people trotted out the old “I’m not racist but…” prefix to arguments punctuated by latent (sometimes blatant) racism. (Choice fail: “And for the record, no, a black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or Pacific Islander Peter Parker would not work, because, contrary to apparently popular opinion, races are different. A black person, regardless of background, will act differently than a white person to different situations.”)

There are plenty of good reasons for a nonwhite Spiderman — indeed, many more than there are for a nonwhite Hermione: the fact that it would shake up a reboot that couldn’t possibly tread any new ground otherwise, the fact that Peter Parker’s neighborhood in Queens is racially mixed enough to make the idea plausible, the fact that Stan Lee has already written an issue where Spiderman is pictured as black. He is different from Hermione, though, in that he’s not easily identifiable as a person of color. Cause Peter Parker is the most whitebread name ever, right?

Except we know lots of nonwhite Joshes and Brandons and any other supposedly whitebread name (and a lot of Dominican-from-the-island Michaels and Jessicas… and a white Jerome), so is it really accurate to assume that Peter is the white dude?

Likewise, with more people of color finding a place in the middle and upper classes, it’s not enough anymore to just stick the nonwhite dude in the background to imply diversity, or in a static “token” role, or as a stock gangbanger/maid/piano man. I’ve never been anyone’s housekeeper; my mother was never a housekeeper; her mother was never a housekeeper. No Latina I know aspires to be a housekeeper. So why was Maid in Manhattan the only visible career option for me and my fellow Latinas growing up? I wanted to be the ass-kicking witch with the cute boyfriend, man — a sentiment that I’m sure was echoed by quite a few other peers of color regarding Spiderman.

MORE THAN ANYTHING, as millennials conscious of the media’s condescending attitude toward us, we can certainly do better than our parents and their parents in representing nonwhites accurately on TV and in the movies. We have to shake this insecurity about race that makes us uncomfortable with our heroes being anything but the white knight.

If not, we risk perpetuating the same negative stereotypes. In part because of media repetition, for example, people are actually starting to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, to the point where the White House actually has to release press statements refuting the rumor. Or, take the doll test, where black girls in a 2007 study were found to overwhelmingly prefer a white doll over the one that “looks bad” — the black one—which suggested a lack of self-esteem caused, in part, by media representation.

Margotu Margai in her role in the first Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows film

Similarly, as writer Keith Woods points out, J.K. Rowling’s own practice of shouting her black characters’ race from the rooftops while coyly alluding to her white characters in more eloquent, prosaic language (see Lee Jordan’s “black boy with dreadlocks” versus Dumbledore’s “…Tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard…”) also serves to hold up whiteness as normal and non-whiteness as an “other” that is not only undeserving of rich language, but summed up completely in one word. If you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it; likewise, if you portray certain people in a certain light for long enough, viewers — including the group portrayed — will buy into that characterization.

Luckily, I have grown into myself enough (and found enough kindred spirits) to be comfortable with myself as a somewhat nerdy brown woman. But I still argue in favor of nonwhite Disney princesses and British witches and geeky New York superheroes on behalf of the little girls and adolescents who feel alienated by the media, despite the ridiculous progress TV and movies have made since I was that young. Art does mirror life, after all — and how can we expect anything to change in real life if our fictional characters remain static?