LOL, well, true enough. Dumbledore’s youth around WWII certainly makes it undeniable that it’s racism.
But ultimately I think Rowling was being even more general than that. It’s about racism, yes, but it is also about class/station, perhaps (as an American I never think about this) pureblood versus everyone else was also about royalty versus commoners.
I think her general theme is a theme that has run through humans forever - are we better off being *exclusionary *or inclusionary? Exclusivity has come up again and again in societies, but ultimately, our social nature makes the bet that being inclusive is a better strategy than being exclusive.
Rowling was trying to imply that the students of Hogwarts are a reasonably good sample of the populations of the United Kingdom and Ireland (which is where all the students come from) without ever quite mentioning their races. She wanted to make it clear that there were some students of South Asian, East Asian, and black (in particular, those whose ancestors had emigrated directly from the West Indies, which makes them “Afro-Caribbean,” to use the British term) ancestry. She didn’t have to say anything about the Asian ones, since Asians in the U.K. and Ireland almost always have Asian names. However, it’s harder to pick out the black students, since blacks in the West Indies usually have British names*.
The British publishers were satisfied with what she did. The American ones weren’t, so they apparently asked her, “Why aren’t there any black characters?” She apparently said, “Well, of course, there are. The Afro-Caribbean names are just English names.” The American publishers then probably said, “Well, how are our readers going to know that?” So Rowling added a few phrases in the descriptions for the American editions making it clear that the characters are black.
One sort of name that is missing from the students, I think, are names from other parts of Europe. There are a reasonable amount of Brits whose ancestors emigrated from Italy, Poland, Germany, or whatever. Given how many names are mentioned in the books, some of them should have been that sort of names, and I don’t think any of them were.
*This isn’t quite true for first names. There are first names that are long-standing English names that in the U.S. imply nothing about the ancestry of their holders but which in the U.K. are now almost always only used among blacks. Winston is one example. It’s possible that the names given to the black characters in the books are of the same sort.
There is nothing analogous to being “half-blood” in the British class system, but it is a crucial notion for the Death Eaters. William and Kate’s child, for instance, is going to fully as royal as its father is, despite its mother being of commoner stock. On the other hand, to a racist being half black is as bad as or worse than being just black.
Also, I pretty sure all the Death Eaters are not upper class wizards, although some, such as the Malfoys are. Indeed, Voldemort himself was an orphan born into poverty, although he had aristocratic family connections.
The theme of the house elves is more like Rowling’s analogue for class relations, although it reflects just one aspect of a long obsolete version of the class system, and even that in a cartoonishly exaggerated way.
Uh, what? Have you never heard someone refer to “good breeding” or somesuch? American upper crust who don’t think you’re important unless you can trace an ancestor back to the Mayflower? I agree with you that the “Mudblood” angle is about racism, but I don’t think your point supports it.
It’s actually the other way around. Dean Thomas was described as black in Rowling’s manuscript, but this was cut by her British editor. She was able to restore the original line for the US edition.
Please do not attribute other people’s words to me! :mad: Those are Lamia’s words, that I quoted, in a properly formatted quote box, explicitly in order to register my disagreement with them!
I quite agree that the “blood” metaphor, by itself, is not sufficient to establish whether we are dealing with an allegory of racism or classism here, but other aspects of the situation make it clear that it is mainly racism. Your quarrel (trivial as it is) is not with me, but with Lamia.
And what the fuck is your point? That children’s books can’t deal with serious topics like racism? (Yes they can, and frequently do.) Or that a child would not get all those allusions to Naziism? - That may be so, BUT by the time she wrote Deathly Hallows, Rowling would have been very well aware that many adults, who would get the allusions, were reading the books too. Furthermore, a child who began the series with Philosopher’s Stone would have been well into their teens, if not beyond, by the time Deathly Hallows appeared, and would probably have learned about WWII in school by then.
In fact, the later books of the series, unlike the earlier ones, are not targeted at children at all, but at what the book world calls “young adults”, and smart young adults (the sort who read books for fun) are quite as likely to know about the history of the Nazis as their parent’s generation are.
Now someone tell me why I am wasting all this time on line arguing about fucking Harry Potter! :rolleyes:
My fucking point, which I guess eluded you, was that the reason the pureblood discrimination/racism parallel was so obvious was because it was serving as a parable to the young people who read it. AK84 seems to have thought that people being rounded up, Dumbledore defeating Grindelwald in 1945, etc, was all just too obvious to be compelling. I disagree.
It was obvious to the parents of the children reading it and the books series ended up being a family participation event. It’s an easy method of relaying history to a child. These things actually happened.
Thanks, Lamia, I didn’t realize that there were passages in the books that were in Rowling’s original manuscript which were kept in the American edition and dropped in the British edition. Did that happen in other places in the books too? In fact, I’ve been assuming that the American editors never even had a chance to see the original manuscripts. I’ve always assumed that the British editors always saw the manuscripts first and made whatever changes they wanted to make. I assumed that this corrected manuscript was what the American editors then saw and made their own changes on, so they never saw the original manuscript at all. Clearly I’m wrong.
I guess it eluded me because it never occurred to me to interpret AK84’s post that way. It seemed plain to me that he was responding, a bit sarcastically, to those who were arguing that the whole thing was not an allegory of racism. It seems fairly obvious, from the post immediately before it.
On the other hand, there was really noting at all in your post to clue one in to what you now say you had in mind.
I apologize. Being misquoted like that did get me a bit upset, but I understand that it was really just an editing error.
Oddly, and probably unrelated, I was given a Kindle version copy (.mobi file) of The Order of the Phoenix that was completely different form the official version. I didn’t know it at the time, but while reading it I commented to a few people that it seemed slightly off. I got through the whole book and then started on The Half-Blood Prince and it was obvious immediately that I not up to speed on the events of the previous book. Sure enough I found a plot summary of Phoenix and it was different. I then went and bought the real version. How would that happen? It was a complete novel, but entirely different.
Side tangent: why do they celebrate Christian holidays at Hogwarts?
