Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2005-01-29 03:54 am
azurelunatic) wrote2005-01-29 03:54 am
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Racism and the Mudbloods
I've been thinking about ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ataniell93's assertion that anti-Muggle and anti-Muggleborn prejudice is in fact different from racism, and wondering why I don't agree with it.
As I understand Az's position, the crux of the difference lies in that when you come down to brass tacks, race, ancestry, religion, and culture do not create the sort of fundamental difference that exists between Wizard and Muggle.
A child of one (human) race and culture can be taken in as a baby and brought up in another culture with a family of another (human) race, and other than some cosmetic differences and a need to keep an eye out for any health issues common to the kid's biological family, there really isn't that much of a difference. Furthermore, parents of one race cannot engender a child of another race. Heredity is pretty straightforward, and while some interesting hidden recessives may show up and surprise everyone, you can't be, say, part Irish unless one of your parents was also either Irish or part-Irish.
Wizardry, on the other hand, is a relatively clear case of have and have-not between the Wizarding and Muggle population. Wizardry is a pan-racial talent, and either you're a wizard or you're not, regardless of ancestry. If you have the power of possession and control of magic, you're a wizard, whether the people around you like it or not. Unlike an Irish child being born to parents with no Irish blood in them, a wizard can be born to Muggle parents, and wizard parents can wind up with a squib in their crib.
JKR hasn't gone into dreadful detail about how, exactly, magic or lack thereof, is inherited. Likelihood is that it's a gene or a combination of genes doing wacked-out things, or it could be triggered by environmental conditions in the womb, or, who knows, the little magic-fairy might go around kissing children and blessing (or cursing) them with magic. Until she tells us, we can speculate all day long, but we still won't know.
Az's position, as I understand it, is that since heredity of magic and heredity of race work differently, and since there are real root-level differences between wizards and Muggles, and there really aren't that many differences between different human races on that scale, saying that anti-Muggle, anti-Muggleborn, pro-Pureblood prejudice is equivalent to racism is logically flawed.
I disagree with the position because I believe that people who hold racism on as extreme a level as Bad Tommy's gang of thugs hold their blood prejudices truly believe that there are differences as extreme as the differences between wizard and Muggle between their hated race and their preferred race. The difference between races may be an illusory other than the cosmetic and the cultural components, but not as far as hardcore racists are concerned. Furthermore, I think that a whole lot of the core members of the Death Eaters are, in fact, so insular and Old-Vor about bloodlines, breeding, and having had magic in the family since time immemorial, that they are in fact taking their prejudice beyond magic vs. non-magic.
One of the rational arguments I heard in favor of the old wizarding families' blood prejudices was, IIRC, in Pawn to Queen, where two of the Slytherins told Hermione that Muggleborn wizards and witches should marry other Muggleborns for as many generations as it took in order to make sure that the magic bred true before introducing their genes into the wizarding society at large. That's a reasonable idea, purely from the viewpoint of wanting to strengthen the genetic tendency towards magic.
But I don't think that half the people who believe in the superiority of wizardkind over Muggles is that rational about the topic. If only all of them were, and did base their opinions firmly on the idea that wizards and Muggles are different, and the magic genes will eventually start breeding true, and stopped wanking over their family trees, then I'd agree withataniell93 that the analogy between Pureblood-superiorists and racists is flawed.
As it is, since Muggle racists can't grasp hold of the fact that there's really no difference between Us and Them, and certain wizards have trouble letting go of the fact that once someone's bloodline has started breeding mostly wizards, that they're an Us and not a Them, I still say that racism and the Muggle/wizard conflict have a lot in common.
ataniell93's assertion that anti-Muggle and anti-Muggleborn prejudice is in fact different from racism, and wondering why I don't agree with it. As I understand Az's position, the crux of the difference lies in that when you come down to brass tacks, race, ancestry, religion, and culture do not create the sort of fundamental difference that exists between Wizard and Muggle.
A child of one (human) race and culture can be taken in as a baby and brought up in another culture with a family of another (human) race, and other than some cosmetic differences and a need to keep an eye out for any health issues common to the kid's biological family, there really isn't that much of a difference. Furthermore, parents of one race cannot engender a child of another race. Heredity is pretty straightforward, and while some interesting hidden recessives may show up and surprise everyone, you can't be, say, part Irish unless one of your parents was also either Irish or part-Irish.
Wizardry, on the other hand, is a relatively clear case of have and have-not between the Wizarding and Muggle population. Wizardry is a pan-racial talent, and either you're a wizard or you're not, regardless of ancestry. If you have the power of possession and control of magic, you're a wizard, whether the people around you like it or not. Unlike an Irish child being born to parents with no Irish blood in them, a wizard can be born to Muggle parents, and wizard parents can wind up with a squib in their crib.
JKR hasn't gone into dreadful detail about how, exactly, magic or lack thereof, is inherited. Likelihood is that it's a gene or a combination of genes doing wacked-out things, or it could be triggered by environmental conditions in the womb, or, who knows, the little magic-fairy might go around kissing children and blessing (or cursing) them with magic. Until she tells us, we can speculate all day long, but we still won't know.
Az's position, as I understand it, is that since heredity of magic and heredity of race work differently, and since there are real root-level differences between wizards and Muggles, and there really aren't that many differences between different human races on that scale, saying that anti-Muggle, anti-Muggleborn, pro-Pureblood prejudice is equivalent to racism is logically flawed.
I disagree with the position because I believe that people who hold racism on as extreme a level as Bad Tommy's gang of thugs hold their blood prejudices truly believe that there are differences as extreme as the differences between wizard and Muggle between their hated race and their preferred race. The difference between races may be an illusory other than the cosmetic and the cultural components, but not as far as hardcore racists are concerned. Furthermore, I think that a whole lot of the core members of the Death Eaters are, in fact, so insular and Old-Vor about bloodlines, breeding, and having had magic in the family since time immemorial, that they are in fact taking their prejudice beyond magic vs. non-magic.
One of the rational arguments I heard in favor of the old wizarding families' blood prejudices was, IIRC, in Pawn to Queen, where two of the Slytherins told Hermione that Muggleborn wizards and witches should marry other Muggleborns for as many generations as it took in order to make sure that the magic bred true before introducing their genes into the wizarding society at large. That's a reasonable idea, purely from the viewpoint of wanting to strengthen the genetic tendency towards magic.
But I don't think that half the people who believe in the superiority of wizardkind over Muggles is that rational about the topic. If only all of them were, and did base their opinions firmly on the idea that wizards and Muggles are different, and the magic genes will eventually start breeding true, and stopped wanking over their family trees, then I'd agree with
ataniell93 that the analogy between Pureblood-superiorists and racists is flawed. As it is, since Muggle racists can't grasp hold of the fact that there's really no difference between Us and Them, and certain wizards have trouble letting go of the fact that once someone's bloodline has started breeding mostly wizards, that they're an Us and not a Them, I still say that racism and the Muggle/wizard conflict have a lot in common.
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I'd say it's a form of racism, because a lot of wizards seem to think that just because muggles don't have magic, they're somehow stupid and less rational. This is just the kind of colonial thinking that the West used to indulge in when discussing 'the natives' in Africa - that they lacked 'civilisation' (magic, for the wizards) and were therefore less rational than us. Wizards do seem to have, in general, this patronising paternalistic attitude towards muggles. One thing that shocked me slightly was in Goblet of Fire was when they seemed to think it perfectly acceptable to keep blasting the muggle man who owned the campsite with memory charms...
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Many wizards do have a distinct prejudice against Muggles, thinking them inferior. Some of those wizards don't have any problem with Muggleborn wizards, as long as they have magic and can be made to conform to wizarding society standards. I consider them very classist, but not racist. Some of them, the ones I consider racist, think any wizard with Muggle parents, or Muggles in their past few generations of ancestry, are inferior.
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I think it's this seeming lack of will to help muggles understand magic and the wizarding world that gets me. It's like they don't think muggles could cope with or understand it. Muggles are always seen in terms of *lack* - a lack that they can never overcome.
You're right, though - it could be more classist than racist, but it does seem to have that tang of racism to me. :)
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And that, of course, makes me wonder what the evolutionary advantage to being Muggle is. Is there one, and wizards are just a fluke, or are wizards the mutants with the survival edge?
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Otherwise we're confronted with a period of history when Muggles and wizards mingled. Why did it end? Why do they have entire departments devoted to maintaining that divide, when there is some cooperation with Muggle governments? We don't know.
I think it's more useful to view the HP world as a metaphor for racism. Hopefully JKR will look beyond the Us vs. Them For No Good Reason thing, and give us more details.
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I also want to find out more about her vision of the universe beyond what's shown in the books.
Allegory Versus Metaphor
- a concerned parent, X-Men2
I think anti-Muggle sentiment is a stand-in for lots of generic prejudice, be it sexism, racism, or homophobia. It is not allegory about our meatspace, but rather a sort of an archetypal civil rights struggle.
Burying age-old bigotry has been an important element of everyday life in this past century. Since Rowling's work tries to be down-to-Earth, incorporating some of that is very natural.
I don't think genes of the mundane kind are involved, and I'd rather not involve them until Rowling does. After all, the prosaic Force midichlorians from Episode I are one of Lucas most anti-climactic unveilings.
Rather, I suspect something more akin to Pratchett's heredity is involved. Susan inherited the powers of DEATH through her "bones", even though her parents were adopted.
Re: Allegory Versus Metaphor
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I think you have some very good points, but my problem with the analogy between "Mudblood"-slingers and racists in our world is that the Wizarding world does/did have a pretty good reason to separate itself from the Muggle world: the witch hunts. I tend to think the whole situation is much more analogous to the Israel/Palestina situation, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland: a mess of mutual suspicion at best, hatred at worst, in which both parties have done some pretty ugly things to the other, and which, in the end, has gone on so long that maybe the blame can't really be assigned to any one side anymore.
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Violence and prejudice entrenched from the cradle is never a good thing.
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My problem is that most people who use the racism metaphor see things in (no pun intended) black and white, Muggles-and-good-Wizards vs Death Eathers, with the former being shiny good and the latter being capital-E-Evil. Doesn't really work that way, and if nothing else, the attitude of a lot of the Wizarding world, even the "good" ones, towards Muggles, tends to be one of patronising goodwill. ("Amazing what they come up with to make up for their lack of magic!")
And don't even get me started on the brainwashing of Muggleborns that goes on at Hogwarts, or I'll be here all day. (It's 5AM and my sleep pattern is fucked, forgive the ramblage.)
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And I would so not let my kids go to Hogwarts, even apart from the brainwashing of Muggleborn kids that goes on there. I mean, the vast majority of the teachers should not be working with kids, or should not be teaching, or both, and there doesn't seem to be anything like parent/teacher conferences to find out how your kid's doing in class--or even to find out if your kid's by any chance being physically abused by the DADA teacher (or psychologically abused by the Potions teacher, for that matter), and argh.
I really have issues with this, can you tell? :D
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I've long suspected, after a friend suggested it to me, that there's quite a bit of memory charming and persuasion spells going on to make sure all Muggleborn wizards go to Hogwarts, and to ensure that their parents don't make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Because personally, I would be banging some doors down if Umbitch (she hurt my boy, I must hate her) pulled that magic quill trick on my kid.
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