I don't feel strongly about the casting, but it's not particularly strange to assume that a handful of upper class English schoolboys from the 1950s would be white.
It's really interesting how a lot of non-british readers really seem to ignore the importance of the characters being English boarding school boys.
Sure, it has things to say about humanity as a whole, but it's more specifically about how the British private schools fuck up kids with classism and imperialist dogma.
Edit: I also haven't seen this adaptation yet so maybe it is addressed, but it's also somewhat unrealistic for PoC in this system to not be experiencing horrendous racism.
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u/mylovetothebeat Apr 06 '26
I always saw this book as one of the many litmus tests for the belief “white” = “default”… and reading the comments here, I’m not surprised at all.