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I can't believe I'm actually sticking a toe in the "Racists or not!" debate, but with all the talk about it I can't stop my head from thinking about it. I don't have a real point or a theory, so I'm just going to try to figure out
First, in terms of the Muggleborn prejudice=racism, I admit I find it really complicated. Sure there are ways that it's like racism, especially in the way Draco Malfoy seems to understand it as a way to insult Hermione Granger. However, if it were an allegory it would be saying that being white is like having magical powers and living in a secret world that is completely arranged around keeping non-white people from knowing of its existence. White people go out and prank non-white people, but non-white people still don't know that because they think white people are fictional or the white people fiddle with them so they lose their memories. Every year, though, a number of non-white couples have white children--or perhaps, children with skills that white people want? So they're let in on the secret, but their parents have to keep the secret and I guess can’t ever really talk about their kids again. God knows their access to them becomes limited.
Someone actually could probably do a story where they used something like this as an allegory, but given that HP spends no time on what it's like for a Muggleborn (they all just adapt, assimilate and stop being non-white and that's fine with everyone?), it just doesn't seem like that's JKR's point.
Because of that I admit I don't much *feel* the racism/bigotry story in the Mudblood idea. I get it, obviously. Intellectually I know it's a slur and I understand that the people who use the word are dehumanizing the people they use it on. Many perpetrators of genocide have used just this sort of idea in judging races. However, it doesn't have quite the same kick to me as a real slur, since Muggleborns just don't seem to be in the same position. When Hermione first hears the word she says she can tell it's rude, but doesn't know what it means--of course, because grew up a Muggle. She grew up as part of the dominant culture and is now again part of the dominant culture as far as we see, since we don't see Muggleborns treated as an underclass. Not being welcome at Grimmauld Place or being the preferred victim of one particular monster does not make you an underclass, as bad as those things are.
Thinking about this lately I realize that I almost feel like the blood prejudice is a slightly different element that's placed into the story to be the rhetoric of Voldemort. The kids in CoS (the non-Muggle-raised that is) respond to Draco's using the slur with anger. Clearly in that scene it’s supposed to remind us of slurs from our world. It’s always the Purebloods who respond most vehemently to the word, which makes sense because they're the ones for whom it means the most. It's the word that marks you as a Voldemort-ish person, obviously. But when Draco or Teen!Snape or Voldemort isn't using the term, it kind of fades away because the blood prejudice idea is so vaguely described. For instance, we know the basilisk goes after Muggleborns. Stuffy Ernie Macmillan brags he's Pureblood back 9 generations, yet is very friendly with would-have-gone-to-Eton Justin, making the Pureblood idea seem sort of class-connected there. We know which families are the old Pureblood clans.
Often in fandom Purebloodedness gets connected with other things, especially class, I think because while we know intellectually that "less Pure" means connections to Muggles, we don't see Muggles and Wizards interact enough for that to mean anything, if that makes sense. (And where Wizards and Muggles do interact it’s often inconsistent and confusing.) Fandom often tries to make rules to follow, for instance by saying Snape couldn't really have been a DE or couldn't really like it or Slytherin because he's a half-blood, but even setting aside the fact that human beings are not always that logical, we don't see scenes of prejudice against half-bloods anyway since our hero is one and it’s never an issue.
This is not to say that the books don't ever seem to show real bigotry to me. They do. Only rarely by using the word "Mudblood." There's one time in the series where prejudice against Muggleborn Hermione feels very real to me. It's when she's having the trouble with Rita Skeeter and she gets a letter that says something to the effect of, "Go back where you came from, Muggle.
Muggle is a slur I feel. Muggles are inferior. Everyone treats them that way. It’s woven into every level of the society. Hell, reading the book as a Muggle myself *I* am known to feel angry and discriminated against. Muggle is, of course, supposed to be a neutral word and not an insult, but it's used as an insult all the time. So is another word that seems an even better example of discrimination: Squib. And there’s Hagrid the half-giant calling Filch a "sneakin’ Squib." (Ahem. And referring to centaurs as Mules.) You don’t need a “bad word” for Muggles and Squibs, because the real thing is so shameful.
My point isn't that OMG the good guys are just the same as DEs! I would rather be condescended to than wiped out, yes. But what I'm saying is that left to their own devices the characters demonstrate realistic bigotry really well, in a way that seems more natural and organic than the official stance against Muggleborns. These are slurs I *feel* instead of just understand. When Hagrid refers to Filch as a "sneakin' Squib" because Filch has dismissed his authority as a teacher (I personally suspect due to the fact that Hagrid has moved up from an employee like Filch to a Professor), he's not just calling him a mean name. He’s reminding Filch that he is part of the underclass of Wizarding Society, because Filch is on the receiving end of the most consistent, hostile prejudice they have: He can't do magic. Incompetent wizards are called "Squib." Mrs. Figg is dealt with suspiciously at Harry's hearing--she seems to not officially exist the way she would if she were a Witch. Filch is the one adult Harry hexes in the hallway (public school boy humiliates janitor denied entry to public school due to circumstances of birth while other students laugh--great). If I were running Hogwarts, not only would Draco Malfoy get detention for using the word Mudblood but there would be hell to pay if any student hexed Argus Filch.
There is one other time in canon Hermione is called a Muggle, at the QWC, and it points up the ambivalent attitude. Malfoy says the DEs are going after "Muggles" and Harry says Hermione's a witch. On one hand, this is true. Malfoy is calling her a Muggle to suggest she is not "one of them," and Harry is rejecting that, which is good. Malfoy is defining "witch" by being related to magical folk, Harry is correcting him that "witch" is defined by having magical talent. Only it's one of those awkward situations where it's hard to correct the person without agreeing with him. For instance, if someone makes an anti-Semitic remark to me, I might instinctually think of correcting the person by saying I'm not Jewish. But at the same time I wouldn't want to do that because it seems like the wrong way to "defend" myself, like I'm saying, "Oh, I'm not one of THEM, so I'm okay."
My intention isn't to judge Harry here on the exact way he defends his friend in the heat of the moment, especially since in that context Draco isn't technically using Muggle as a slur. But I do think his reaction here is the consistent one with Wizards because we never get the other side of the defense. Hermione never steps up with, "Yes, Malfoy, I am a Muggle. My whole family is Muggles and we're a lot better than you are." No, Hermione seems to share the Wizarding view of Muggles as inferior. In OotP when Ginny is disparaging Arthur's agreeing to try stitches to cure his wounds Hermione does not respond to her, "Stitches...I ask you!" by saying that hey, Muggle medicine is actually pretty damn good and what on earth is silly about the idea of stitches? Instead she says "fairly" (according to the narrator) that they do work on non-magical wounds. (Amazingly I've actually heard *readers* talk about how stupid the idea of stitches are...wtf? What would they do if they cut themselves at home? Smear on Eye of Newt?)
In fact, I can’t remember Hermione ever having much to say on the subject at all. When I was reading over the CoS chapter I realized that Hermione literally *disappears* in the scene. As soon as Malfoy calls her a Mudblood it becomes about Ron and Draco. Hermione squeals once and she and Harry bring Ron to Hagrid’s, but Hermione is silent and clueless until Ron explains what happened. When Kreacher calls her a Mudblood the Twins and Ginny get angry at him. I don’t have a solution for what this “means” if anything. Mostly it always seems to me that, just as it was that first day, the word to Hermione is just any other insult, this one far less hurtful than something like Snape’s remark about her teeth, because Hermione feels self-conscious about those and while she may feel very self-conscious about being a *newcomer* to the WW, I don’t know that she thinks of it in terms of blood. She may, of course, in which case we just got into an even more disturbing area, where Hermione has internalized the Wizard contempt for Muggles completely and is actively trying to eradicate all her ties to her family and that world. Especially since the Weasleys are so quick to respond to the word; it has meaning for them which, I cautiously admit makes me wonder if they just identify Hermione as a Muggleborn in their minds all the time the way Harry doesn't.
So for me, the books accurately portray bigotry any number of ways, but the most obvious is Muggle/Wizard. Squibs, being non-Magical, are treated with equal disdain. Which does not mean they're always insulted, as I'm sure many will point out. The attitude towards Muggles seems to usually run along the lines of many bigots in the real world, where using a racial slur isn't racist if the person has "earned it" by living down to the stereotype. Iow, as long as you don't annoy the person, your race isn't an issue. This is the defense the Weasley twins and many fans have for Dudley's being given a tail, Dudley's tongue being swollen up, Dumbledore's violent mead glasses, Harry's hexing and Hagrid's insulting of Filch. But this is why, as a Muggle, I recognize it more as something I see as racism. I know I'd never be an equal to these people. If I stepped out of line the wands would come out so that I'd know my place. The blood issue is, of course, an outgrowth of this same prejudice. There is, imo, just far more vivid depictions of the larger issue than the subset.
It just seems to me to be unavoidable when you’ve got a story that has at its center a question of bigotry, with a maniacal leader and followers who you maybe want to be associated with Nazis and the Klan or things like that, yet also the appeal of protagonists defined by their being superior to other people.
First, in terms of the Muggleborn prejudice=racism, I admit I find it really complicated. Sure there are ways that it's like racism, especially in the way Draco Malfoy seems to understand it as a way to insult Hermione Granger. However, if it were an allegory it would be saying that being white is like having magical powers and living in a secret world that is completely arranged around keeping non-white people from knowing of its existence. White people go out and prank non-white people, but non-white people still don't know that because they think white people are fictional or the white people fiddle with them so they lose their memories. Every year, though, a number of non-white couples have white children--or perhaps, children with skills that white people want? So they're let in on the secret, but their parents have to keep the secret and I guess can’t ever really talk about their kids again. God knows their access to them becomes limited.
Someone actually could probably do a story where they used something like this as an allegory, but given that HP spends no time on what it's like for a Muggleborn (they all just adapt, assimilate and stop being non-white and that's fine with everyone?), it just doesn't seem like that's JKR's point.
Because of that I admit I don't much *feel* the racism/bigotry story in the Mudblood idea. I get it, obviously. Intellectually I know it's a slur and I understand that the people who use the word are dehumanizing the people they use it on. Many perpetrators of genocide have used just this sort of idea in judging races. However, it doesn't have quite the same kick to me as a real slur, since Muggleborns just don't seem to be in the same position. When Hermione first hears the word she says she can tell it's rude, but doesn't know what it means--of course, because grew up a Muggle. She grew up as part of the dominant culture and is now again part of the dominant culture as far as we see, since we don't see Muggleborns treated as an underclass. Not being welcome at Grimmauld Place or being the preferred victim of one particular monster does not make you an underclass, as bad as those things are.
Thinking about this lately I realize that I almost feel like the blood prejudice is a slightly different element that's placed into the story to be the rhetoric of Voldemort. The kids in CoS (the non-Muggle-raised that is) respond to Draco's using the slur with anger. Clearly in that scene it’s supposed to remind us of slurs from our world. It’s always the Purebloods who respond most vehemently to the word, which makes sense because they're the ones for whom it means the most. It's the word that marks you as a Voldemort-ish person, obviously. But when Draco or Teen!Snape or Voldemort isn't using the term, it kind of fades away because the blood prejudice idea is so vaguely described. For instance, we know the basilisk goes after Muggleborns. Stuffy Ernie Macmillan brags he's Pureblood back 9 generations, yet is very friendly with would-have-gone-to-Eton Justin, making the Pureblood idea seem sort of class-connected there. We know which families are the old Pureblood clans.
Often in fandom Purebloodedness gets connected with other things, especially class, I think because while we know intellectually that "less Pure" means connections to Muggles, we don't see Muggles and Wizards interact enough for that to mean anything, if that makes sense. (And where Wizards and Muggles do interact it’s often inconsistent and confusing.) Fandom often tries to make rules to follow, for instance by saying Snape couldn't really have been a DE or couldn't really like it or Slytherin because he's a half-blood, but even setting aside the fact that human beings are not always that logical, we don't see scenes of prejudice against half-bloods anyway since our hero is one and it’s never an issue.
This is not to say that the books don't ever seem to show real bigotry to me. They do. Only rarely by using the word "Mudblood." There's one time in the series where prejudice against Muggleborn Hermione feels very real to me. It's when she's having the trouble with Rita Skeeter and she gets a letter that says something to the effect of, "Go back where you came from, Muggle.
Muggle is a slur I feel. Muggles are inferior. Everyone treats them that way. It’s woven into every level of the society. Hell, reading the book as a Muggle myself *I* am known to feel angry and discriminated against. Muggle is, of course, supposed to be a neutral word and not an insult, but it's used as an insult all the time. So is another word that seems an even better example of discrimination: Squib. And there’s Hagrid the half-giant calling Filch a "sneakin’ Squib." (Ahem. And referring to centaurs as Mules.) You don’t need a “bad word” for Muggles and Squibs, because the real thing is so shameful.
My point isn't that OMG the good guys are just the same as DEs! I would rather be condescended to than wiped out, yes. But what I'm saying is that left to their own devices the characters demonstrate realistic bigotry really well, in a way that seems more natural and organic than the official stance against Muggleborns. These are slurs I *feel* instead of just understand. When Hagrid refers to Filch as a "sneakin' Squib" because Filch has dismissed his authority as a teacher (I personally suspect due to the fact that Hagrid has moved up from an employee like Filch to a Professor), he's not just calling him a mean name. He’s reminding Filch that he is part of the underclass of Wizarding Society, because Filch is on the receiving end of the most consistent, hostile prejudice they have: He can't do magic. Incompetent wizards are called "Squib." Mrs. Figg is dealt with suspiciously at Harry's hearing--she seems to not officially exist the way she would if she were a Witch. Filch is the one adult Harry hexes in the hallway (public school boy humiliates janitor denied entry to public school due to circumstances of birth while other students laugh--great). If I were running Hogwarts, not only would Draco Malfoy get detention for using the word Mudblood but there would be hell to pay if any student hexed Argus Filch.
There is one other time in canon Hermione is called a Muggle, at the QWC, and it points up the ambivalent attitude. Malfoy says the DEs are going after "Muggles" and Harry says Hermione's a witch. On one hand, this is true. Malfoy is calling her a Muggle to suggest she is not "one of them," and Harry is rejecting that, which is good. Malfoy is defining "witch" by being related to magical folk, Harry is correcting him that "witch" is defined by having magical talent. Only it's one of those awkward situations where it's hard to correct the person without agreeing with him. For instance, if someone makes an anti-Semitic remark to me, I might instinctually think of correcting the person by saying I'm not Jewish. But at the same time I wouldn't want to do that because it seems like the wrong way to "defend" myself, like I'm saying, "Oh, I'm not one of THEM, so I'm okay."
My intention isn't to judge Harry here on the exact way he defends his friend in the heat of the moment, especially since in that context Draco isn't technically using Muggle as a slur. But I do think his reaction here is the consistent one with Wizards because we never get the other side of the defense. Hermione never steps up with, "Yes, Malfoy, I am a Muggle. My whole family is Muggles and we're a lot better than you are." No, Hermione seems to share the Wizarding view of Muggles as inferior. In OotP when Ginny is disparaging Arthur's agreeing to try stitches to cure his wounds Hermione does not respond to her, "Stitches...I ask you!" by saying that hey, Muggle medicine is actually pretty damn good and what on earth is silly about the idea of stitches? Instead she says "fairly" (according to the narrator) that they do work on non-magical wounds. (Amazingly I've actually heard *readers* talk about how stupid the idea of stitches are...wtf? What would they do if they cut themselves at home? Smear on Eye of Newt?)
In fact, I can’t remember Hermione ever having much to say on the subject at all. When I was reading over the CoS chapter I realized that Hermione literally *disappears* in the scene. As soon as Malfoy calls her a Mudblood it becomes about Ron and Draco. Hermione squeals once and she and Harry bring Ron to Hagrid’s, but Hermione is silent and clueless until Ron explains what happened. When Kreacher calls her a Mudblood the Twins and Ginny get angry at him. I don’t have a solution for what this “means” if anything. Mostly it always seems to me that, just as it was that first day, the word to Hermione is just any other insult, this one far less hurtful than something like Snape’s remark about her teeth, because Hermione feels self-conscious about those and while she may feel very self-conscious about being a *newcomer* to the WW, I don’t know that she thinks of it in terms of blood. She may, of course, in which case we just got into an even more disturbing area, where Hermione has internalized the Wizard contempt for Muggles completely and is actively trying to eradicate all her ties to her family and that world. Especially since the Weasleys are so quick to respond to the word; it has meaning for them which, I cautiously admit makes me wonder if they just identify Hermione as a Muggleborn in their minds all the time the way Harry doesn't.
So for me, the books accurately portray bigotry any number of ways, but the most obvious is Muggle/Wizard. Squibs, being non-Magical, are treated with equal disdain. Which does not mean they're always insulted, as I'm sure many will point out. The attitude towards Muggles seems to usually run along the lines of many bigots in the real world, where using a racial slur isn't racist if the person has "earned it" by living down to the stereotype. Iow, as long as you don't annoy the person, your race isn't an issue. This is the defense the Weasley twins and many fans have for Dudley's being given a tail, Dudley's tongue being swollen up, Dumbledore's violent mead glasses, Harry's hexing and Hagrid's insulting of Filch. But this is why, as a Muggle, I recognize it more as something I see as racism. I know I'd never be an equal to these people. If I stepped out of line the wands would come out so that I'd know my place. The blood issue is, of course, an outgrowth of this same prejudice. There is, imo, just far more vivid depictions of the larger issue than the subset.
It just seems to me to be unavoidable when you’ve got a story that has at its center a question of bigotry, with a maniacal leader and followers who you maybe want to be associated with Nazis and the Klan or things like that, yet also the appeal of protagonists defined by their being superior to other people.
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As it stands, I didn't. But try again!
Also, I have to wonder why someone who's too "Nice" and so above the lameness that is new FW knows so well what's going on there.