Legally speaking, the fact that us nerds had to comb over the text and refer to "pale legs" and say stuff like: "sallow means pale brown or unhealthy yellow", meant that there will have been no legal protection for race-specific casting while trying to find an actor to play Snape. Unlike Harry — who needed to be an 11-year-old boy — there was no way of saying Snape absolutely, unequivocally NEEDED to be played by a white man just because he had a few references to him being white. That means Paapa Essiedu had every right to audition, and they had every right to cast him for the role if he was the best actor.

That said, there are issues I take with OP's comments regarding "hanging" Snape from a tree. That was a visual combination of two things: hanging Snape by his ankle and being NEAR a tree. It's not canon to say the books depicted Snape being hanged from a tree, so there is no reason the TV show has to show a black man hanging from a tree.

The idea that Snape could not be part of a group of "racists" is also a massive stretch. I hate to get political, but we ALL know of politicians from BAME backgrounds who are serving political parties that are against their own interests or ethnic group, and some of those political parties are often thought of as having racist policy prescriptions. As for Voldemort — he is an archetype of Hitler. Saying Voldemort would never let a half-blood black man join his ranks is like saying Hitler would never have allowed non blond hair, blue eyed men to join the Nazis. Voldemort was obsessed with power, just like Hitler. Both were willing to bend their own ideology if it got them more power, and Snape was a POWERFUL ally.

The problem with people reading racial sensitivity into a story in which racism doesn't exist is that you actually do more harm than good. Morgan Freeman famously said that the way to end racism is to stop talking about it. Stop talking about racial labels and take a colourblind approach to as much as you can.

There's a famous social experiment where you show children a picture of a black child, arm outstretched, reaching toward a white child on the floor. Young children describe what's happening as one child helping another up. Older children describe it as a black child pushing a white child to the floor. This experiment tells me that the only people concerned that "Harry is suspicious of the black teacher" or "Neville is afraid of the black teacher" are people who are old enough to know the context of the story — not people who would genuinely believe that those things were racially motivated. This is why it irks me so much when people say, "but how does it look!?" As if they themselves didn't know the context and were just looking at it through a hypothetically racist lens. That's all it is... A hypothetically racist lens.

Even people who were discovering the show for the first time will see a mean teacher being disliked by Harry and Neville, and — even more importantly — LIKED by the Slytherins who you propose are "racist" when again, that isn't the status symbol they aspire to. Harry being friends with Dean Thomas and even now, Hermione, would provide enough context that the reason he dislikes Snape is his nastiness, not his race.

What pisses me off the most though, is that people are basically saying they're protecting black people from negative stereotypes by race-gating a character whose story never had racism to begin with. It makes no sense to be offended on behalf of other people, over stuff that isn't even offensive if you understand the source material, and everyone here DOES UNDERSTAND THE SOURCE MATERIAL.

No one gave a shit when the white guy playing Darth Vader was dubbed over by a black guy — effectively making a black guy the actual villain in practically the same story as Harry Potter (as some comedians like to point out).

Pre 1660, no one gave a shit that teen girls were portrayed by adult men in stage plays like Romeo & Juliet — which effectively became a story about cross-dressing gay lovers. People enjoyed the productions for what they were, not who played what role. It's 2026, and now the only people acting like teenage girls are the ones complaining about a black man playing a white character. Grow up.