Prof Responds: Present Characters, but Not Known Ones

About this episode

Professor Julian Wamble discusses community insights on race and representation in storytelling.

In this Prof Responds episode, Professor Julian Wamble returns to "The Color of Magic" to sit with what the CMT community brought to the post-episode chat. Before diving into the comments, Julian opens with an invitation to listeners who hesitated to speak on race, arguing that silence is never neutral. Prejudice lives more in architecture than in bad apples, and that the Kingsley's warning on the Wireless Wizarding Network is a model for what it looks like to use proximity to power on behalf of people the system wasn't designed to protect. From there, the episode moves through three themes the community surfaced: whiteness as the invisible default, the impossible standard Black characters are held to, and the difference between being present in a story and actually existing in one.

People in this episode

Host: Professor Julian Wamble

Topics covered

• race
• whiteness
• Black characters
• storytelling
• power dynamics

Keywords

• race
• whiteness
• Black characters
• storytelling
• power
• invisibility
• prejudice

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Wireless Wizarding Network

Books & works: The Color of Magic

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• Seamus Finnigan & the Making of "Irish McIreland" · May 20, 2026 · 1h 13m
• Prof Responds: D.A.D.A, Power, and the Politics of Fear · May 13, 2026 · 55 min
• Defense Against the What??? · May 6, 2026 · 1h 7m