HEY J.K. R-DOGGS IMMA LET YOU FINISH BUT I GOT SOME REAL PROBLEMS WITH THE APPROPRIATION OF RACIAL PERSECUTION AND SUBTLE AND UNFORTUNATE THEMES OF CULTURAL ASSIMILATION IN YOUR BOOKS

In my perpetual and obsessive hunt for anyone who might somehow, somewhere, not be agreeing completely with everything that I have ever said, I’ve noted some skepticism vis-a-vis assmilation, its presence in the Harry Potter series, and its place in the majestic annals of my little brown childhood as a book about racism with eight fucking people of color present in all of its majestic 4195 pages.

So let me elaborate.

The themes of racism, assimilation, and cultural erasure in Harry Potter are a massive fucking problem, and unlike, say, more than eight PoC,^[1] they are present. They are constant. And they are obvious. In book one Hermione proudly states her muggle heritage as the very first thing about her, not even giving out her name before saying at an enormous speed , “Nobody in my family’s magic at all, it was ever such a surprise when I got my letter…” By book seven the name she gives out is somebody else’s. By book seven, and a long time before that, she doesn’t dare to be herself.

It’s very obvious to anyone who has ever glanced at the spine of one of these books that wizards do not like muggles. Even by the standards of the good and the kind, they are at best a subject of condescending fascination, and at worst a greedy^[2], gullible population of useless man-babies^[3].

Fig. 1: The Grizzly Man of magical assholes.

Even the word itself seems to have the ring of a racial epithet; it’s nearly always use in a derogatory manner, and “blood status” is dictated by being as genetically far from muggles as possible. Magical blood is desirable blood, and anyone without it is worthless no matter how they got that way.

Let’s take a look at squibs. Another word one step away from a slur, squibs are just as unwelcome in the wizarding world as muggles are. Their opinions count for nothing, they are a subject of unthinkable shame^[4] and ridicule, and are politely encouraged to keep the fuck out of this whole magic thing altogether. While “mudbloods”^[5] fill the roll of the tragic mulatto, squibs are expected to assimilate twice as much, and not even with the world they were born into. You either fit into their world or you get the hell out of it.

J.K. Rowling is an intelligent woman. A generous woman. A woman wise to the cruelty and unfairness of the world around her. A woman for whom I have a single, simple question.

Are wizards supposed to be dicks?

It’s a given that muggles aren’t welcome in the wizarding world. Okay. Fine. Putting that obvious hurricane of bullshit, let’s talk about the innumberable mountains of condsecention, exclusion, and balls out, unabashed, right-up-in-your-muddy-little-faces “blood supremecy”^[6] decorating my entire goddamn childhood.

Fig. 2: This has nothing to do with white supremecy.

— Arthur’s Weasley’s fascination with muggles, as if they are something to be studied rather than humans to interact with on an equal social level and thus reducing them entirely to the differences between his culture and theirs^[7]. This mirrors with painful clarity attitudes of unthinkably stupid white people toward other cultures, their sad tendency to appropiate and wonder at the quaint/mysterious/socially uncceptable traditions of these cultures, and their ridiculous savior complexes^[8]

Fig. 3: A powerful argument on the subject of brown people not knowing what computers are.

— refusal, even by the weasleys^[9] to adopt, acknowlege, or learn from muggle technology including various medical proceedures like chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants^[10], electricity, guns^[11], computers, television, recording devices such as ipods or cds or casette tapes or 8 tracks or vynil records, airplanes^[12], any beverage besides alcohol, weaker alcohol, or fucking pumpkin juice^[13], forensic science, space shuttles, internal medicine, cars¹⁴, plastic, lined paper and fucking pencils.

— also why do they have quills is she saying that wizards invented pens?

Fig. 4: Sorcery

— why do they have toilets?

Fig. 5: Also sorcery

— if wizards did invent pens/toilets then a), why aren’t their toilets magic, b), they are shit at hiding pens and toilets from us, and c), they are also shit at making pens because we are clearly way the fuck ahead of the vis-a-vis pen-related technological advancements

— are there just no wizard artists because how the fuck does anyone draw without a pencil?

— their dickish refusal to share their hugely benificial technology with muggles, including the ablity to reattach amputated limbs and reverse paralysis, the ability to repair and even regrow broken bones, their ability heal gigantic life threatening lacerations that would kill a muggle in minutes, their ability to generate unlimited clean energy out of fuck nowhere, vechicles which run on fucking nothing and so would solve the oil crisis and the two fucking wars we’re in, mental magic which if used voluntarily likely be extremely useful as a psychiatric treatment

— combining the technological efforts of wizards and muggles would likely advance human society as a whole by literally hundreds of years.

— but wizards just won’t fucking do it

— the only reasoning ever given for any of this is “oh nooooo but muggles would be jeeeeealous”^[15] and “bluh bluh bluh muggle shit doesn’t work when things are ~magic~” which a) is obviously total bullshit because how the fuck do they work radios or cars or cash registers, it’s not like they could even have like an old timey cash register with no wiring or other electric aspects because they haven’t even figured out how a fucking type writer works, they don’t even have fucking /tellegrams/, b) why is there an entire department of the ministry devoted to the confiscation of misused “muggle artifacts”^[16] if none of them fucking work, c) once again if they don’t work then why is it illegal to have them. Even taking that to the most logical conclusion, that they don’t want muggles getting ahold of them, why it okay to have things like magic wizard feather pens, a mail service concisisting entirely of fucking owls (by which logic there are birds carrying all of the packages you ever send anywhere, and while something like a rememberall or a box of acidic slug pus might go unnoticed, people are probably going to wonder what’s up with the fucking broomsticks and christmas presents and anything bigger than a loaf of bread.

And further still down the breadcrumb path of douchery, we have out tragic mulattos themselves. I’m not sure excatly how anyone could possibly be unclear as to how this reflects racism and its effects on its victims; “mudbloods” (otherwise referred to as the scum atop the pure, unsoiled gene pond) are insulted, persecuted, and eventually rounded up and presumably disposed of. ^[17]

Fig. 6: This has nothing to do with the holocaust.

Oh sure, you can argure that it’s just because the people who do those things are dicks, except for the part where pretty much everyone does them. There are laws to fuck mudbloods over. There are words to fuck mudbloods over ^[18]. There are microaggressions and prejudices and the KKK and Wizard. Fucking. Hitler. The themes of tolerence come straight out of Joanne NMN Rowling’s beautiful British mouth, and yet she wasn’t tolerant enough to put more than eight minor character’s worth of brownness in four. Thousand. Pages.

I don’t believe that J.K. Rowling is a racist, but you tell me if that’s not. You tell me if that’s approriative as fuck. You tell me that’s not taking the past atrocities and a present system of opression so ingrained in the public mind that it’s practically invisible. You get up out of your swivel chair, look your keyboard in the eye and tell me that that is not a white woman looking down at a world of murder and persecution and violation and being wiped off the face of the fucking earth which she will never, ever experience or understand, and deciding it would be really great story if it were told by other people who will never experience or understand it. You stare right into your monitor and you tell yourself that tolerance can be taught without the presence of the people you’re supposed to be tolerating. You take a look at us and tell yourself that that’s okay.

Harry Potter taught me a lot of things, but what it didn’t teach me was to stop hating every drop of muddy blood in my body. What it taught me was to hate it more. What it taught me was that every step I took toward that sloppy, dirty half of myself was a step away from being accepted. From being worthwhile. From being loved.

Careful the things you say, Ms. Rowling. Children will listen.

——

Footnotes
——

1. Dean Thomas, Cho Chang, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Blaise Zabini, Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, and the Patil twins, all of whom play no significant part in the main plot and would make no significant difference if removed from it entirely.

2. SS, Amer. Ed., pg 65:

“‘But what does a Ministry of Magic do?’”
“‘Well, their main job is to keep it from Muggles that there’s still witches an’ wizards up an’ down the country.’”
“‘Why?’”
“‘Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.’”

Wizards want magic solutions = the natural order. Muggles want magic solutions = greedy little shits.

3. CoS, Amer. Ed, pg 40:

“Ron’s school spellbooks were stacked untidily in a corner, next to a pile of comics that all seemed to feature ‘The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle’.”

4. SS, Amer. Ed., pg 99

“‘Are all your family wizards?’ asked Harry, who found Ron just as interesting as Ron found him.
‘Er — yes, I think so,’ said Ron. ‘I think Mom’s got a second-cousin who’s an accountant, but we never talk about him.’”

5. Another term which is wildly easy to connect to real world racism, as it not only flung at persons of undesireable genetic origins but contains an actual word denoting something brown, filthly, and valueless.

6. Come on that one’s not even an allegory.

7. See also: Every line that Arthur Weasley ever has.

8. See also: Everything that Harry Potter ever does.

9. Ootp, Amer. Ed., pg 507:

“‘Well…well, I don’t now whether you know what — what stitches are?’
‘It sounds as though you’ve been trying to sew your skin back together,” said Mrs. Weasley with a snort of mirthless laughter, ‘but even you, Arthur, wouldn’t be that stupid — ‘
‘I fancy a cup of tea too,’ said Harry, jumping to his feet.
Hermione, Ron, and Ginny almost sprinted to the door with him. As it swung closed behind them, they heard Mrs. Weasley shriek, ‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT’S THE GENERAL IDEA?”

10. Unless wizards have a way to either not get or actually fucking CURE CANCER in which case holy fucking god they are unbelieveably shitty people and also as I’ve pointed implies that they view muggles in the same way muggles view animals, ie, basically no one anywhere is going to give a dog chemotherapy or a gerbil a heart transplant or administer AZT to a parakeet, and when there are treatments for anything from a gangrenous infection to encephilitus to a broken fucking bone people will like 80% of the time let the thing fucking die over paying for them
.
11. Which J.Kizzle R-Boss has canonically stated trump a wand 100% of the time and could therefore be used to shoot Voldemort in the fucking face and end every last turd of this shit twenty years ago.

12. No. Apparition does not count. It is NOT useful over long distances, hence portkeys and so on which also must be basically useless in comparison because even if you did have one of those freaky Mary Poppins bags Hermione has in DH (which with Hermione being Hermione is presumably a fairly tricky spell that most people would have a hard time pulling off) and didn’t have to somehow try to get all your luggage to portkey around with you, if this is how people get around and by what we have to go on in GoF does not appear to cost any money, why is it that the Weasleys can never ever afford to go on vacation except when they win 1000 galleons in PoA? Speaking from 22 years of experience in being pretty goddamn poor, the reason my family hasn’t taken a vacation since I was five and someone else paid for it is air fare. They really, really fuck you on air fare. And even with the need for accomedations for their ridiculous litter of offspring, at least two of said litter have been employed outside of the U.K. for the entirety of the series, with Percy being a relentless douche from book 3 onward, leaving between seven and six Weasleys rather than nine. So unless they burned that tent in GoF down afterward, I’m pretty sure they don’t get around by portkey.

13. Which I will never EVER believe would not taste like something you licked out of the bottom of a dumpster.

14. Which are CLEARLY more convenient than wizarding travel as the ministry itself breaks the laws restricting them from exploring the benifits of muggle technology when ever the fuck they feel like it.

15. Someone please make me a “wizard tears” gif.

16. Another ridiculously condescending term. WE’RE RIGHT THE FUCK HERE YOU TOOLS THOSE AREN’T ARTIFACTS THAT’S JUST OUR SHIT.

17. DH, Amer. Ed., pg. 1 -759.

18. It’s mudblood, by the way.