2023.11.27
The British have never been known for possessing great taste when it comes to dealing with other cultures. While their empire stretched across a quarter of the world at its peak, spanning the broad range of human experience, they seemingly have integrated none of those cultures’ elements into their own, remaining as intolerant and dry as ever. This is never more clear than with J.K. Rowling’s beloved Harry Potter series. While Rowling captured the imaginations of children and adults across the world, a closer examination of the Wizarding World shows one riddled with casual racism, stereotypes, and more. With these books marketed at young minds and hundreds of millions of copies sold, it is important to look at this series with a critical eye and recognize the potentially harmful messages conveyed.
Rowling centers this series on our three main protagonists: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. While the storyline focuses mainly on these three (Harry in particular), there is a wide range of characters introduced throughout the series. By simply looking at the names of these side characters, a pattern starts to emerge. Seamus Finnegan, who is Irish. Anthony Goldstein, who is Jewish. Kingsley Shacklebolt, who is Black. And the most commonly spotted example is Cho Chang, who is Asian. Rowling seemed to be able to harness a world of fantasy when naming her white characters, such as the name Dumbledore coming from a dialectal word for bumblebee, as she imagined Dumbledore humming and buzzing to himself through the halls. Yet, when faced with the clearly insurmountable challenge of naming non-white characters, only these surfaced in her brain. These naming conventions not only further hurtful stereotypes of minorities but also have real-world consequences. Katie Leung, the actor of Cho Chang in the movies, has expressed multiple times the racist comments she faced portraying Cho Chang, no doubt a product of how the character was written.
Another glaringly obvious example in Wizarding World is the goblins. In this universe, Goblins are a race of short, bald, and hooked-nose humanoids that run the banking system. They are described as greedy, and very powerful when it comes to banking and finance. This depiction plays heavily on Jewish stereotypes and even goes a step further. Goblins are established as a lower race than humans, despite Goblins not particularly agreeing with this arrangement. Despite being equal to or greater than humans in magical and intellectual capacity, they are relegated to second-class status, running the Gringotts Wizarding Bank. This anti-Semitic imagery has been brought to light many times before, with Rowling denying all connections.
The last and most problematic portrayal in the book series is that of the elves. The elves are a group of subservient humanoids, permanently acting as slaves to humankind. With this relationship so heavily ingrained in wizarding society, the elves feel no will to be free, and actively avoid it. The first freed elf we see in the series, Dobby, is constantly ridiculed by his peers for wanting to be set free from his abusive master. When Hermione Granger organized a group called the Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare in response to the injustice she saw, she was also ridiculed by her peers, the acronym of her group being “SPEW.” A group that wants to be enslaved is a very dangerous rhetoric that has been used countless times to maintain systems of oppression in the United States, including chattel slavery. This rhetoric is still being echoed today, in places such as Florida’s education system, where students are taught that enslaved people in the South liked their position in society, and got useful work experience out of it. Self-determination is one of the most important rights for oppressed peoples, and elves are clearly portrayed as people in the series, with needs and desires. Yet, SPEW and free elves are treated essentially as a joke throughout the book series and movies, as the main characters simply accept the status quo. Rowling’s portrayal of enslavement echoes an incredibly powerful and dangerous argument and is not one that should be ingrained in young minds.
There is no denying that Harry Potter has had a massive impact on the world of literature. While Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings firmly cemented the fantasy genre in the adult mind, Harry Potter exposed millions of children to the fantastic, as opposed to the realistic. And as I write this article, I listen to the magical soundtrack to the Harry Potter movies, composed by John Williams. But as J.K. Rowling declines into TERF-dom and Dumbledore’s portrayal in newer films sparks accusations of queer-baiting, it’s all the more important to take a critical eye to this body of work that is so beloved by millions, including myself.