Why is Lord of the Rings better than Harry Potter?
Because at least Lord of the Rings dressed up the darker-skinned indigenous people and portrayed them as swarms of marauding orcs.
(via Will study social interaction for food)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Which Black character, Lee Jordan? Kingsley Shacklebolt? Blaise Zabini? :/
Mind you, I’m not even a hardcore fan of the series…
I think London kids identified with the Hogwarts mix especially. Looking at the Great Hall shots they used in the movies, it looks pretty much like my own school days make-up (perhaps a little more brown needed in my case, we were on the edge of Southall/Hayes):
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kaufman_debra/Harry-Potter-Cinesite/assets/043_fn_001a_v08.0131_pr-lg.jpg
That’s why it’s a bit of a culture-shock for me when the right-wingers from the US make a fuss about ethnicity or colour or languages spoken in class – we celebrated Diwali, Ramadan, Xmas, learned to swear in Punjabi and Somali…let’s just say that UK boarding-school-themed literary output has come a long way since Enid Blyton’s nightmarish ‘Carlotta’…
@Elena, I think that’s the point of the .gif – in US films you’d have A character of colour, not multiple, making that character ‘the(only) black one’…
(Also, Angeline Johnson and Dean Thomas off the top of my head)
…not to mention Angelina Johnson. Other non-white characters include the Patil sisters and Cho Chang. Furthermore, the casting for the films appears to have been colour-blind, with some characters (e.g. Crabbe and Lavender Brown) changing race half-way through.
No, that’s backwards.
The objection is that there is no significant, memorable, important black character in the Potter movies.
What is Harry potter?
IIRC Lavender Brown was changed half-way through; in a later book, her hair was described as blonde, so they re-cast the character as white for later films.
Damnit. I’ve just realised that (as Emrysmyrddin points out) the cartoons are praising Harry Potter, not insulting it.
I’ve not seen the latest three films, so can’t say what sort of treatment they gave to film-characters, but Kingsley was important…
…I’m debating about spoilers, which is pretty silly because the books have been out for years now…
…but all throughout the /books themselves/ the spread and varying importance of characters was good; the whole message running through the series was a fight against prejudice and fascism.
Seriously? Are people defending the Harry Potter films as something other than a festival of whiteness?
In comparison to what we’re usually fed, the films were alright. My own point was that the books are even better than the films in that respect.
As others have sais, there are several characters of various ethnicities – Cho Chang, the Patils, Lee Jordan, etc. The population actually is probably pretty close to UK demographics. Setting a film in the UK, and having the students resemble the actual student population is a good thing, isn’t it? It’s true that of the “main” few characters, none are black. But if you were to select a few at random from the population, you might easily end up with 3 protaganists that are white. Harry’s main love interest through the series before Ginny is Cho Chang, the Patils are frequently mentioned. There are quite a few black characters, Dean Thomas and Lee Jordan show up repeatedly and one of the Aurors (Kingsley). I can’t be certain based on some .gifs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Emrysmyrddin is correct, and that the point was that there are characters of diverse ethnicities in the movie.
Compared to The Lord of the Rings?
The racial makeup in this photo is similar to the UK average (which has a much smaller fraction of non-whites than the USA). It’s a festival of UK demographics.
It might be different ‘oop Naarth’ (discounting places like Bradford), or other extremities of the isles, but down here in the South we’re pretty well mixed. Usual caveats about personal experience etc.
A particularly pervasive type of Hollywood racism is the assignment of races to characters, even when completely irrelevant to the plot. Needless to say, the default race is white.
The Harry potter films have clearly not done this, with many of the roles having been assigned without any thought to race. In fact, both Lavender Brown and Vincent Crabbe change race between films.
@6. PZ Myers : 14 January 2012 at 8:04 am
So who’s the significant, memorable important black character in Lord of the Rings then?
Also does it really matter?
Do we judge characters on the colour of their skins or the actions showing their hearts?
Does every story, every myth, every literary creation need to have someone black / white / yellow /blue etc .. in it & if so is African mythology “racist” for not including Europeans just as European mythology is for not including Inuit and South Americans and Maori and Ainu and Chinese as their lead heroes?
A stories setting – its location can sometimes rule out certain groups of people being in it for the sake of plausibility. If you set your story in the Deep South of America, an African-Amercian hero is logical and makes sense. But if you set your story in a world based around an English boardings school or a European meta-myth an African-American hero is a lot less plausible and is jarring and out-of-context. Which interfere’s with suspension of disbelief and potentially ruins the story.
You don’t expect polar bears and walrus to pop up in ancient African mythology – if they do you need a good explanation for their unusual presence. It isn’t impossible to have out-of-place characters but it does alter the type of story you’re telling and may not suit the story you’re trying to tell.
If you want to read stories, see movies or TV shows – fictional or otherwise – about African-American heroes, if that’s your thing, there are plenty around. There’s biographies of Martin Luther King, the the Hurricane movie, there’s the heroic tribal leader in King Solomon’s Mines, there’s Captain Benjamin Cisko from Deep Space Nine & so on.
But there’s also many occassions where African-Americans aren’t relevant to the story – any more than the ten thousand and one other ethnicities from Ainu to Zimbabwean wouldn’t be relevant either. Just because of where a given story is set, what its themes are & so on. Harry Potter – an English boarding school with traditionally European witchcraft and wizardry motifs – and LotR essentially a European fantasy epic are examples.
Can’t we just take a story, a novel, a myth for what it is on its own merits without trying to shoehorn modern political correctness and every ethnic group on the planet into it?
But one is ginger. Doesn’t that count for something?
–o–
Based on Daniel Whatshisname’s expression in the last frame, I’d say he took it to point out the lack of ‘primary’ protagonists of colour.
But what do know.
@17. hyperdeath : 14 January 2012 at 8:38 am
One example of this that struck me as particularly annoying was when the Star Trek franchise decided non-human aliens – the green blooded, green skinned Vulcans – had to be abruptly made “black” or at least have a (formerly )persecuted black-skinned ethnic component to their species as well for no apparently in-‘verse sensible reasons. They then tried to use this as a laboured metaphor for racial issues in historical America which, yeah, is not logical. Or fascinating.
They’d have done much better, IMHON, to (re)make the Vulcans as originally described more alien and green skinned than go the other “oh no not another anvillious race relations metaphor” route.
Mind you, I think having Lt. Uhura, Geordi laForge, Ben Cisko and family and in Babylon-5Dr Stephen Franklin were all great and appropriate and esp. that first one ground-breaking positive characters. Sometiems subtlety is the best approach – the use of both Chekov and Uhura (& Sulu too) in the original Trek is a good example of that.
They did not recast Vincent Crabbe, they created a new character (or pulled one from the book) since the actor who portrayed him got himself in some legal trouble.
So which character should have been black?
I think Emrysmyrddin is right. The point is that the cast is ethnically diverse instead of having just one token black guy. That’s why Radcliffe says “which” instead of “what black one”.
Oh & Tuvok worked okay as a character too, I’ll add.
@22. Thomas :
Sirius.
Any of them.
Any number of them.
I’m asking a Sirius question, StevoR.
I took his ‘which’ to mean ‘which one out of the plural’ rather than ‘which one as we don’t have any’. If that’s a misinterpretation I apologise, but as there is plurality I can’t really see the latter interpretation.
Plus Regulus, Bellatrix and the rest of the Black family.
Incidentally as an amatuer astronomer I enjoyed & apporved entirely of JK Rowling’s use of star names representing characters.
Plus Dumbledore was gay – literally. Of all the people to accuse of not representing enough diverse demographic groups JK Rowling, the Potterverse generally would not be on my list.
Yes, PZ I *am* defending the Potter books and movies. They were an enjoyable, thought-provoking, intelligent read and they were great fun too. Plus the way they dealt with ethical complexietes and politico-cultural relations bewteen the various in-verse groups human and otherwise in a fairly non-religious, pro-science (okay, sure magic and all but still) manner was I think, pretty impressive.
Incidentally, lets not forget that Tolkein was writing in a very different era with a very different perspective on the world. We have made a lot of progress since and it doesn’t make him a bad person or the books any less impressive stories. (Okay, I’m a fan, I enjoyed reading Tolkein’s works too durnnit. No they may not be flawless, nothing is, but, hey, they’re not bad for their time and what they are either.)
@chigau (同じ), So if the only “main” black character was Voldemort, people would be okay with that?
@Thomas :
About which of the two stars in the Sirian system – the white dwarf star or the main-sequence A-type star which is the commonly known as the Dogstar and is the brightest star seen in earth’s night skies? (Planets and the occassional supernova excepted.)
Okay, okay, I know I’m giving you silly answers.
In my defence, I’m more than half asleep right now and so I’m heading to bed to return tomorrow properly awake.
@StevoR
It would have been inconsistent to make Sirius, Bellatrix and the rest of the Black clan anything other than white. The one non-ethnically diverse group in the series (seemingly on purpose) were the Death Eaters, and the Black family were part of the pure blood conspiracy.
Lupin may have been a good candidate, but I’m not about to second guess Rowlings choices. It’s her imagination, she can cast the characters as she sees fit.
Thomas
I’m not sure why you want to limit to 1 the number of “black” characters.
Voldimort’s skin colour was unusual for a “caucasion”.
Sure there were only a handful of black characters but at least none of them were the usual negative stereotypes.
Director Spike Lee is a strong critic of black sterotypes and characatures in films – “They’re still doing the same old thing … recycling the noble savage and the happy slave.” http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v29.n21/story3.html
To quote Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, “The network does not want to see negroes on television unless they are buffoons”. If we’re protesting racism in film, this is what we need to be really angry about, in my opinion.
The worst recent offenders are probably the awful transformers movies in which the token black character is a black man acting like a blackface performer, not to mention the black stereotype robots – http://youtu.be/uF7ZGRYNCtg
BTW. PZ, can I ask – have you read the books mentioned here yourself?
Final thought for the night :
If we’re ranking things based on having strong black characters does that mean Star Wars – especially the prequels – is to be judged superior than both LotR & Harry Potter because of the black Jedi leader Mace Windu? Really?
Never mind the narrow, tokenistic “Has this novel /movie / whatever got a black-skinned character and what rank is he?” approach shall we instead lets look at what “message” these books are sending out about the values of friendship and co-operation across very different groups against intolerance and bullying and power used for evil ends. Both LotR and HP rate very highly in my view on that latter count.
As I recall, there’s overall a helluva lot less black people in Britain proportionally as compared to the U.S.
I’ve read most of the Harry Potter books and saw the first couple of movies. They fit into a very narrow cultural niche — not just in color, but in how they portray the world.
Surely no one can possibly think I was defending LotR’s coloration with this post — it’s even more whitebread than Potter. Tolkien has some highly problematic attitudes towards race that I don’t see at all in Rowling.
If all we were doing is judging movies by how ethnically diverse they are, than yes, Star Wars is superior to Potter and LotR. Fortunately, I’m not doing that.
And seriously, watch the clip the images were taken from. The black guy is not commenting cheerfully on the ethnic diversity in the movie.
Is Star Wars superior, though? I can think of four black Harry Potter characters without much effort, plus Asian and Indian characters. In Star Wars, I can think of two black characters and none of any other ethnicity.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England , 2.9% of England is black. For a story set in an English boarding school, I’d say they got it right; there are a half dozen black main characters out of a total of 20 or 30 main characters.
Seriously? “The black guy“? His name is in the second image.
I think this may be appropriate here:
George Lucas and John Stewart re his new movie “Red Tails” about the Tuskegee Airmen:
Video link (to Hulu)
Source for headline
And lets not get started on the Jetsons.
And Star Wars did have the execrable Jar Jar Binks with his Yessa Massa et al. One of the most offensive parts of the characterisation for me was the head shaking,loose-lipped burr to his speech, this harked back to the worst Afro-Carribean caricatures on TV in the 1970’s UK.
There is also Guinan on ST:TNG (a character who might be seen as conforming to a trope for an elder Black woman) and Harry Potter’s briefly potential date in the coffee shop just before he is whisked away by Dumbledore. There actually is a paper on the color-blind kind of world that is depicted in Harry Potter (it focuses on the books) which notes, “One of the privileges of Whiteness is to deny the impact of race on people’s lives, and this privilege is readily apparent in the Harry Potter series.”
—
@StevoR
I recently rewatched the LOTR series, and here is one message I perceived it having this time: genocide is OK against the ugly, the deformed, the retarded, the hateful, the darker skinned, and the non-Western. The elf and the dwarf were constantly trading highfives on the number of orcs, goblins, and Haradrim (Persians) they slaughtered. Is that really a good message of how to build friendship across racial lines? At least in Harry Potter, they only acted in self defense instead of launching an all out genocidal war against Voldemort’s allies (and Harry Potter himself stopped Sirius Black and Remus Lupin from moving in that direction).
Er, I don’t remember Kenan and Kel (which I watched and loved as a child) being a force for awareness-raising; it was two dumb kids trying to buck authority in typical comedic situations with predictable and bumbling outcomes. Sister Sister was much better at dealing with the high-school experience and various social issues while still retaining sitcom-acceptable levels of comedy. That lack of awareness-raising didn’t make K&K a bad show; it simply wasn’t the sort of show to tackle issues. HP does; the whole plotline is about recognising unfairness and prejudice and combatting those things when the majority of society doesn’t care or is too apathetic/frightened/unenlightened to provoke change. I value both K&K and HP; however, when it comes to awareness-raising I know which one I’d favour as a vehicle.
See Harry Potter And The Imbalance of Race or Harry Potter and The-Race-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
It’s not a question of the number of non-white characters. It is about the difference between how even minor white characters are described vs how black characters get short description as if knowing their race means one already knows what they look like (as in ‘they are all the same to me’?). Notably the even fewer Asian characters have even shorter descriptions. Does Cho even have one?
And why until the appearance of Kingsley are all non-whites relegated to such background roles? (Even Kingsley isn’t seen much, and he totally fails as the highest ranking Order member during the 9 months of Voldemort’s rule.) If Rowling’s point is to show that wizarding ‘racism’ is only about magical blood-purity and not about the skin-pigmentation variety why can’t we see a non-white character that actually matters? (Hey, the Black family could have been black, that would have fit right in with Rowling’s sense of humor.)
Of course there are more problems with in-group vs out-group relations in HP – and I mean among the ‘white hats’. Some examples are the treatment of non-British Europeans (Goblet of Fire in particular, but also Seamus who has no personality beyond his role as a collection of Irish stereotypes), the exotic non-Europeans (ibid), and their treatment of magical minorities such as giants and werewolves and dehumanizing of people like us, AKA Muggles.
Sorry why does a movie, which i based in the fantasy London setting ‘have’ to have a black person in it??
Because you have blacks in America, and that is your particular issue? We have lots in the UK, as well but I would say much more Asians and Indians especially in London, does the director ‘have’ to start representing everybody?
This is just political correctness in overdrive, at the expense of free art. Just like things being subject to Islam approval, things have as well now subject to race representation equalities approval.
StevoR:
And they do that by turning the ‘hero’ into a bully (in HBP) and a war criminal (in DH). Who is such a great friend that his bestest friends fear him and feel the need to appease him and tiptoe around him lest he explodes (or sends his owl to peck them, and enjoys seeing their scars afterwards; a year later Hermione will follow this example with magically conjured birds). Such a great friend he doesn’t know anything about Hermione’s life, doesn’t like being in her company (GOF and DH) and really only thinks of her as far as how useful she is to him. As for other kids – barely worth a thought. Kids not in his House – if they are not his long-standing enemies he can’t remember their names even after sharing classes with them for 4 years.
(Oh, I can rant about other characters too.)
anat,
I agree with you so much. HP books want to promote friendship and tolerance so very hard, but in the end they do it in a very superficial way. If you look a tiny bit deeper, the whole thing fails rather spectacularly.
@PZ
I strongly disagree with you there, PZ. As an Australian, and therefore somewhat of an outsider to most popular films/literature which is either from the UK or USA, the Harry Potter series speaks to a much larger “cultural niche” than you give it credit for.
It may seem foreign and narrow to you as an American, but the world-view of the series speaks to my culture far more than most American films/literature – even though our culture is hugely influenced by American culture and about 90% of films, literature and TV we get is from the USA.
Furthermore, the films and books are obviously incredibly popular worldwide with audiences of all ages – surely this huge fanbase is not a “niche”.
The series may not speak to your culture or be relevant to your culture, but certainly it does/is to mine.
I think the comment by clarkcox hit the nail on the head, when he noted that only 2.9% of England is black. Criticising the films for not having a racial mix similar to most American films/tv shows seems a bit strange. It’s a criticism that, to me, seems very U.S centric. Harry Potter is not an American film series and should not have to pretend to be one to avoid offending Americans.
To go off on a short tangent, as someone who (occasionally) works in film/tv I might just be bitter about always having to take into account the U.S. market when I know that in the U.S. they rarely take into account the the international market – certainly not the Australian market. UK audiences don’t seem to mind going to a bit of extra effort to understand Australian culture and visa versa. US audiences, however, are fare less receptive to cultural differences and differences such as this.
Relevant to the UK’s racial mix, I think the films did an admirable job of representing racial diversity. Certainly better than the average US film which just includes one token, stereotypical black character who usually plays the role of the fool.
(OMG attempting to debate PZ is frightening!)
@Aratina Cage
I had a browse through that paper and I’m unconvinced. It seems to assume that whenever Rowling doesn’t mention a character’s race, that character is automatically white – I don’t buy that. When I read the books, one of the things I like most was that Rowling didn’t stipulate (well, only a handful of times from memory) what race characters were, so I could imagine them how I wanted.
Furthermore, one of the main, recurring themes of the books obviously the rejection of race superiority. It seems strange to me that this is so overt, but people try and infer racism anyway.
This reminds me of the Earthsea mini series from a few years ago. Ursula K. LeGuin disowned the work because all of the main character were white when, in her books more of the character were various shades of brown-red. Yes, the makers of the mini series made a choice to change one of the main components of her work.
Also @anat – most of what I’ve seen from your comments is just character assassination of Harry and Seamus. I’m unconvinced by your negative interpretation.
NB: If that sounded flamey – I promise it wasn’t intended as such! :)
Oh, dear. PZ launching a Lord of the Rings vs Harry Potter debate? Focusing on the films, which is guaranteed to piss off the fans of the books? And on a blog read by geeks?
Man, that’s nothing to the whole overt vs not-so-overt racism, here!
Gotta provoke controversy and raise those pageviews! *flees*
I don’t really see the issue. While the characters are predominantly white, I think it is forgivable considering the story and location.
An argument could be made, I think, regarding the amount of white people at Hogwarts compared to other minorities. Considering Slytherin (1/4 of the school) as a house hearkens to the ‘keep the blood pure’ mentality, its understandable how some families may stay white. And close knit, considering how the Weasleys are related to the Malfoys.
Also, the minorities get some time in the sun. The World Cup had many ethnicities & Kingsley Shacklebolt becomes Minister of Magic.
Besides, considering how all the races in LOTR are largely segregated from one another…
I think people are expecting too much from a cheesy kid’s series. She has black characters. They are one-dimensional and vivid, just like her white characters. You can make the case that none of the blacks are in her top ten or even top twenty, that maybe she should have swapped Shacklebolt for McGonagal, for example. But both Shacklebolt and McGonagal are cheesy stereotypes, and the latter fits better as a feisty teacher than as a beleaguered warrior. And as pointed out, quite a few of the characters like Lavender Brown seem to be race neutral. I’m not happy that the movies fired the black Lavender actress when they realized that she would be eventually be romantically linked to Ron, though. But the movies took a lot of liberties with the books anyhow, carefully paring away everything interesting to make room for more action sequences.
The movies? Who knows. I imagine they were sort of whitewashed. I only watched them once and they sucked.
The books have lots of important characters of colour.
Kingsley Shacklebolt
Lee Jordan
Angelina Johnson
Dean Thomas
Cho Chang
the Patil sisters
Blaise Zabini (not as important a character)
Those are just the ones whose colour was mentioned, off the top of my head. If you don’t think they are “important” enough, then you obviously haven’t really read the books. Am I right, HP fans?
It’s true that our main three characters are white. I guess I just didn’t see that as so unusual in a castle in Scotland.
Also, isn’t JK Rowling’s whole message about non-discrimination against elves, goblins, and other magical creatures a metaphor for racism? I mean, the fight against those who want to keep wizard blood “pure”–it’s kind of one of the main themes of the books.
@windwaker9
I haven’t read the HP books myself, maybe that’s why the part I quoted seems truer to me than to you. Issues of race were left largely untouched by the films other than in a “Black is beautiful” kind of way with both Ginny and Harry falling in love with non-White characters for a brief period each.
Bah. What a stupid thing to say especially given the enormous talent playing out the characters in each series.
SteveOr asks why it matters. It matters because people of color deserve to see themselves in popular films just as much as white people do. To ask why it matters whether there are people of color in films is pretty reliable marker of white privilege. You’ve never felt what it’s like to go to yet another film and see nobody who looks like you with an important speaking role.
windwaker9 says:
On what basis do you not buy that? It’s a pretty well-established pattern in literature, film writing, and pretty much any other English-speaking media.
The difference between HP and LOTR is exemplar of how racism has changed over the years. LOTR represent overt disdain for darker skinned people, casting them universally as villains and savages. HP represents the softer side of racism, where token gestures towards racial diversity are made, such as having Harry interested in Cho Chang, however, as PZ notes, there are no people of color with significant speaking roles. In addition, the whole metaphor of “pure-blood” vs. “mud-blood” is an obvious metaphor for racial purity. To me, though, that makes it worse in a way; JK Rowling appropriated the idea of struggle over racial purity without ever making it explicit, and without including any people of color in major roles. It smacks of appropriation, frankly.
Look folks, just like with sexism, we’re all steeped in racist thinking since the day we’re born. The null hypothesis is that you already harbor some racist assumptions about the world. Likewse, 99% of mass media reflects and reinforces those racist assumptions. Hell, George Lucas, the man who creates the obviously racist caricature of Jar Jar Binks, was recently on the Daily Show complaining about how racist Hollywood is. He’s been trying to get this movie, “Red Tails,” made about a group of black WWII fighter pilots, made for years, but since there were no major white speaking roles, Hollywood told him–for years! to George Lucas!–that they had no idea how to market the film and it couldn’t be made. Now that it’s out, Lucas is worrying that if it fails, all of black cinema (meaning films starring mostly black folks and directed by black folks) could be set back for years, maybe decades. This is the guy who created Jar Jar fucking Binks. HE is concerned about the racism in Hollywood. Do NOT try to argue that racism is not a problem in mainstream movie-making, including HP, unless you enjoy looking like a clueless dolt.
Regarding LoTR — there are many many problems with the character portrayals in the books. Tolkien was a product of his time however, and trying to cast various main characters by skin color to somehow “fix” this would have been worse*. The books are pretty clear about all the main races (elves are fair skinned, hobbits are essentially English farmers, etc etc). They are also very clear about the races of the men who are evil. It is racist, but to try and whitewash that out would change it. Better to talk about the messages and how wrong they are now than to try and pretend that Tolkien didn’t write it that way.
I don’t think you can compare modern literature to older stuff and expect the older stuff live up to our sensibilities today, again better to recognize the problems that were there. I think you can expect modern literature to do so and I didn’t think Harry Potter did a bad job (though I have to agree with @anat).
*Tolkien’s portrayal of women is just as bad. Of the two strong women in the books, one sits back and does nothing, the other decides to be the perfect ideal of a woman (for the time) after doing heroic deeds. Despite the movie, Arwen makes absolutely no showing at all.
That’s using the narrowest possible definition – excluding those classifying themselves as Asian*, mixed-race, and other non-white categories. According to your source, 86.4% are white. Not having either read the books (I heard Stephen Fry read the first one) or seen any of the films, I don’t know exactly how they stack up, but assuming magical ability is equally spread ethnically, about 1/6 of Hogwarts should be non-white, if it draws pupils and teachers only from England – a bit less if from the whole UK.
It’s set in England of the present, which is not nearly as white as you seem to think – and to judge by your crap about “political correctness”, would prefer.
*Which in the UK generally means from the Indian subcontinent.
Sorry, arithmetic error@61: 1/8 would be nearer than 1/6.
To michellezapf-belanger:
Angelina, Blaise, Lee and the Patil sisters are barely characters at all. The Patils only exist in order to show Harry and Ron’s failure at romance in GOF, Angelina only exists in the context of the Quidditch team (and off canon supposedly marries George so they can both mourn Fred together or something), Lee announces Quidditch matches, hardly does anything else. Blaise exists so we know how awesomely pretty Ginny has become, that even Slytherins acknowledge this. Dean has a bit more going for him – since he lives in Harry’s dorm room he has a bit more presence.
Kingsley – despite being a mostly offstage adult, we can learn something about him. He is a kick-ass fighter (read the battle in OOTP closely), handy with some kind of mental magic (Albus claims Kingsley memory-charmed Marietta, but her behavior after the fact suggests something more sinister, maybe illegal), was raised in a totally wizarding family (nobody with any awareness of the non-magical world would say ‘firelegs’) and totally fails as strategist or leader once he becomes the acting Order leader (after Alastor’s death).
I understand why all the core characters are white. Harry is the wizard boy from Rowling’s dream on the train, Hermione is based on herself, Ron on her childhood friend, Severus on her school-teacher. I can understand she can’t imagine them any other way. But why can’t Luna, Neville or the Blacks be non-white?
I tried to stay away. I tried, people. The inner fangirl can be an ugly and demanding thing.
*deep breath*
Anat.
In HBP, Harry is fifteen. He’s an abused kid growing into a teenager; his zero trust in adults is being fulfilled when the current adults in his life are keeping things from him. He’s afraid of Voldemort, afraid of the burgeoning war, still having recurring PTSD about another character being murdered in front of him as well as visions straight from Voldy’s warped little mind. People are ignoring him about Malfoy, and he’s been told of the prophecy and all that it entails. He’s got stupid amounts of both responsibility and expectations heaped upon him, people are dying left right and centre, and his golden image of his parents and their friends as faraway idols of youthful virtue have been shattered. The attack on the Ministry in the previous book was mostly his fault, and resulted in the death of a character that was the only parent-figure he could have hoped for.
Tl;dr? Harry’s a fucked up teenager with a temper problem. We’re all asses as teenagers. He makes up for it in spades.
Please specify. Referring to the use of Unforgivables in a war situation? Again, part of the series is about shades-of-grey, and that characters are not all good and all bad, and that people fuck up but it’s choosing to pay for that that makes it better.
See above RE: abused, grieving, half-mad, teenage boy with the weight of the world (literally) weighing on him.
GoF: During Harry and Ron’s row? Hermione’s a library geek; Harry doesn’t care much for homework. Hermione spends all her time doing homework; Harry is bored. Translates to ‘doesn’t like being in her company?’ Er?
DH: Can’t tell what you’re blithering about. Again, specifying would be helpful.
Er? Where? He admires her intelligence, yes, and mentions that she’s brilliant quite a few times – but this is a real stretch. Why on Earth would they have stuck around each other day in day out at school if they didn’t like each other?
I can’t find this reference. Citation please? I know that when I was in school, up until GCSE we never had mixed-House classes; even PE was House-segregated. Until I got to the upper years and the GCSE classes meant a diversification of elective topics, there were many students in my own year group who I recognised by sight but hadn’t had an opportunity to mix with before. I was the only one from my particular primary school, so like Harry came up to secondary education with no ties and no friends; the most available people to form ties and friendships were my Housemates. Not quite sure where you’re going with this.
*exhales* I’m a bad, bad person. Down, fangirl.
In this world, in this series, the main point of civil strife and discrimination is magical purity, although other points are also touched on (anti-transhumanism, elf slavery etc.). The way that this is represented and handled is so transferable to so many civil rights issues that I’m honestly amazed that some seemed to have missed it.
HP’s not a perfect series, and JK’s not the best writer – but it/she does a damn enthusiastic job of trying to deal with prejudice and othering in a kid-friendly way.
I can’t say anything about the HP movies, having never seen them. The books did contain non-white characters, some of whom had significant roles. Also, is there any reason to assume that the main characters are white or at least “pure” white? Why couldn’t the Potters be black or maybe Asian? True, Harry is described as green eyed, which is recessive, but they’re magic. Maybe Dumbledore overrode his natural eye color to make him look more like Lily to get Snape to want to protect him. Ron is described as red haired so that puts him as pretty clearly anglo, but Hermione is described as having “bushy” hair and I don’t remember any description of her coloring. So why shouldn’t she be cast in the movies or people’s imagination as African?
Neville can’t be non-white because he’s an example of inbreeding gone wrong (little magical talent despite “pure blood”) and it would ruin the analogy if he were non-white. Similarly the Blacks are an old British magical family so they can’t be non-white, which would imply recent immigration. Also, they’re rich-old money. How likely is that for a non-white British family? Luna could be and I can’t think of any evidence that she isn’t, but then again I often blow past descriptions of characters. Maybe she is described as white somewhere.
The LOTR is a product of its time. In its time not only was racism the norm, genocide was something “reasonable” people contemplated. It’s no wonder that it came out a bit fascist. Not that Peter Jackson couldn’t have changed that in the movie…for example, is there any real reason to make all the hobbits white?
First of all, I think the point about American vs British culture is a salient one. The stories were written in England, and don’t have the same context they would have, were they written in the US.
Second, and I realize this may be going out on a limb or whatever, but I write fantasy, and generally I write the stories as they come to me. I don’t stop halfway through and think “oh geez, I should add some cultural diversity over here”. I expect that I’ll have characters of various races as I write, since that seems to be the trend, and then I’ll have to do a lot of work to make sure I’m not doing something really boneheaded while trying to write from a perspective I have no life experience with, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make every book or story contain an equally strong character from every under-represented race, gender, and sexual identity.
Would you really WANT to read a book like that? Some books have strong characters of various ethnicities, and some don’t. Demanding that every popular work of storytelling fit the myriad of expectations is foolish.
Where’s the Maori character? How about the Laplander?
This isn’t a case of purposeful exclusion of a race, this is a case of a story written by a white woman, which means it’s more likely to be from her perspective, and a bunch of people second-guessing the author because the novel wasn’t EVERYTHING they thought it SHOULD be.
If you have a problem, write your own novel, don’t imply that the author is racist just because a book doesn’t have a strong enough black/asian/scandanavian/native american/incan/etc. character to fit your own view of a perfect story. If Hermoine had been black, somebody would have accused her of pandering – of writing a white character with black skin, or something else like that.
There is a legitimate conversation to be had about racism, but this isn’t it, so yeah – I guess I am defending Harry Potter.
I did laugh at the GIF, before I went on to read the conversation.
Also, why bring LOTR into this at all? Seems like a bad example. Maybe it’s the “thinking on saturday morning” thing.
To windwaker9:
So a character who jinx people he doesn’t like, including a magically-disabled one, from hiding to his own and his friends’ enjoyment isn’t engaging in bullying behavior? And torturing an enemy for *spitting* at his teacher (a powerful witch who can stand up for herself) isn’t war-crime? I never particularly cared for Harry’s character, but the late books made me lose any remnant of respect for him.
And #68: Are you referring to the Langlocker curse? This is HBP-Harry (see above RE: teenaged arsehole and reasons why) targeting Argus Filch, a man who under Umbridge carried a horsewhip around in the corridors to use on students, advocated hanging pranksters by their wrists from shackles in the ceiling, remained caretaker under the Carrows in DH – and you know what their systems of punishment were – and has always been set up as the ‘big old meanie adult’ foil to the students’ ‘pranking’ culture; something that is a meme in English boarding school fiction (usually falls to Matron). If you’re taking this as a measure of Harry’s character, I have to blink at you. How many times is Filch magically pranked in the entire series? Do you take Fred and George’s Portable Swamp as a swipe at a disabled man?
Plus, using Cruciatus on Carrow – at that point, they’re at war. It was a furious reaction to a despicable act, and was also wrong wrong wrong. From all we’ve read about the Unforgivables up to this point, the reader already knows that it’s wrong. Putting the Death Eaters under Imperio at Gringotts was wrong; would they have been able to proceed past security after being rumbled as Polyjuiced if Harry hadn’t? Do spies and secret agents not murder, manipulate and drug during war? The whole series has a very ambiguous relationship with the notion of ‘The Greater Good’, and I think that’s deliberate; it highlights that anyone can be bad and think that they are working for good, that doing what you think is right at the time can still have bad consequences, and that human people have human reactions to horrible situations.
This is a perfect example of how people abandon critical reasoning when their privilege is called into question. Yes, it is theoretically possible that these things are the case. But it is vanishingly unlikely. It is orders of magnitude more likely that JK Rowling, like most white Anglos, presumes white is the default, and only notes race when it deviates from that default assumptions. You have no evidence to suggest otherwise; bringing up this absurd possibility serves only to deflect attention from the racism inherent in Rowling’s assumptions. Please note: this is not like saying that Rowling is KKK member. I am merely noting that she is subject to the same biases as any other white person in her culture.
No, sorry, anytime racism comes up is a legitimate time to have a conversation about racism. Why ever should it be otherwise? Racism is endemic in our cultures, and it is therefore present in the overwhelming majority of our cultural products. I enjoyed the books AND the movie, but that doesn’t stop me from saying I’d enjoy them even more if they’d done better on race issues. And gender issues! But that’s another conversation.
Yes, I WOULD want to read a book like that. Why not stop and try to counter your own unconscious biases? How could that do anything but make your writing better? Women and people of color are expected to understand and identify with the experiences of white men on a daily basis. Women and people of color write convincing stories with white male protagonists all the time. Why is it that white men are presumed to be incapable of such elementary feats of empathy? We are, after all, talking about various types of human experience.
the wast majority of majority of pupils at Hogwarts is not described in the books, as such we do not know their color. It is not strange for a white person in a predominantly white school to have mostly white friends.
I think Dianne #65 explained i very well why some of the caracters had to be white and StevoR covered why the demografic in the movies isn’t wrong(the book did not stipulate color, the reader can see what color they want)
I agree that the movies could have more non-white actors but this is a problem with american casting not the book it is taken from.
There is no doubt that Rowling (and Tolkien, if we’re talking about both serials) is a white author, born and raised in the UK and carrying a serious case of white privilege.
I love the Harry Potter books (and, to a lesser extent the Tolkien works) but I don’t think loving the books means I can’t recognize the privilege of the author. These discussions have to be had so that people are aware of their own privilege. After all, Rowling could have made her hero anything (even, gasp, a girl) but she chose to make him white and male. Why? Who knows. Rowling doesn’t seem inclined to examine it publicly but why shouldn’t literary critics and/or fans of the books? Rowling is a relatively young author. Perhaps these discussions will encourage her to be more aware of white privilege in future works.
That said, the charge of white privilege can be brought, ofcourse, against many celebrated authors. Where are the characters of colour in The Great Gatsby? What about The Old Man and the Sea? Catcher in the Rye? I hate all those books but I’ve had to read them all because they were examples of “brilliant” writing. To not like them was to be a philistine.
I hated them because, as a feminist, I find their treatment and/or exclusion of women offensive or because a story of a self-indulgent boy’s coming of age just isn’t my thing. My opinions were pooh-poohed by professors who assured me that these stories were universal (because the male experience is the universal one, I guess). So, who am I to deny that treating the white experience as universal isn’t diminishing of people of colour? I know exactly how it feels to read a “great” work and either not see my experiences reflected in it or to see them denigrated, objectified or ridiculed.
I don’t think Rowling (or Tolkien) is racist. I don’t think the readers of her books are racist. However, we are all a product of a racist (and sexist and heteronormative) culture, so sometimes we don’t see the exclusion of non-white stories.
I do believe that Rowling’s writing is more inclusive than Tolkien’s (were people of colour exist only as foreign invaders*) but she is also writing 70 yrs later. Let’s hope she’s more inclusive.
*I’m talking about the books here, not the movies. Jackson has included people of colour in the orcs; domestic invaders.
This is a perfect example of how people abandon critical reasoning when their privilege is called into question.
I was tempted to snark about how I love it when white people lecture me on my privilege, but then it occurred to me that I haven’t any idea what your race is, really, and decided against it.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that these things are the case.
I agree with you that it’s more likely that Rowling visualized all 3 of her main characters as white. But why should that stop the producers of the HP movies from casting Harry as mestizo or Hermione as African? Well, unless Rowling did impose a veto.
…Please note: this is not like saying that Rowling is KKK member. I am merely noting that she is subject to the same biases as any other white person in her culture.
Indeed, how could she be otherwise? Everyone is subject to the biases of their culture and times. I suspect that one reason that she did not include many non-whites in her books is that she doesn’t know many non-whites and had little basis for writing about their experience. Or maybe not. She was a single mother welfare recipient when she started writing. Maybe she had a very diverse group of friends. It still won’t make her perfectly enlightened about race.
QFT.
Yes, I WOULD want to read a book like that.
I wouldn’t. At least, not as I understand the book being described. Because the one thing I dislike in a book more than having no women, racial or ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, etc is having characters who are women or minorities whose only purpose is clearly to be the Strong Woman(TM) or the Wise Black Man(TM) or the Wonderful Gay Friend(TM). I’d really rather have people write about people they know and have more authors who are women, racial minorities, ethnic minorities, etc to make the fictional world more diverse.
Bad as Tolkien is with racism and sexism, I actually like what he did with the few women he did include in LOTR. Eowyn is there because she’s a woman frustrated with the role in life society has forced on her and not afraid to do something about it (or rather more afraid to NOT do something about it than to die trying to change the situation.) She’s not in the book because Tolkien wanted to include a “strong woman” but because her character worked in the context.
Please. Have you not been following what’s been going on in Hollywood lately? First they whitewashed “Airbender,” then “Akira” (thank goodness production of the latter has been put on hold). Even if Rowling had specified that HP was mestizo or whatever, given our past experiences with casting in major Hollywood movies, it’s quite likely that they would have cast white people in the leading roles anyway. If JK Rowling is unconsciously racist, Hollywood is deliberately, consciously so, though they give the excuse that it’s “marketing” that forces them to exclude PoC from leading roles.
Why did you assume that that’s what I wanted? I specifically mentioned white women and PoC writing convincing white male characters, and questioned why white men aren’t expected to be capable of the same feats of empathy. Obviously, writing using racist/sexist stereotypes is still racism, and I wouldn’t want to read that shit either. But it’s curious that you would think that that’s what I was talking about, when what I was really doing was calling for white male authors, filmwriters, directors, etc., to step up to the plate and do the same thing that women and PoC do on a daily basis: recognize that we are all humans and as such are capable of understanding and empathizing with each other.
I had a hard time understanding at first, getting confused by the two alternate explanations—but the video clearly settles that. It’s bizarre how two faced our media is, like people tend to think of Disney with this warm feeling that it promotes certain good values like beauty being skin deep, but only does so by playing into the stereotypes like only using the pretty characters as protagonists and the ugly ones as antagonists.
To: #70 SallyStrange (Bigger on the Inside), Spawn of Cthulhu says:
“Yes, I WOULD want to read a book like that. Why not stop and try to counter your own unconscious biases? How could that do anything but make your writing better? Women and people of color are expected to understand and identify with the experiences of white men on a daily basis. Women and people of color write convincing stories with white male protagonists all the time. Why is it that white men are presumed to be incapable of such elementary feats of empathy? We are, after all, talking about various types of human experience.”
You make a good point here, and I guess I didn’t make myself clear – I DO do that consciously, but I don’t try to do ALL of it at once. I’m a white, cis-male who’s not attracted to other men, and I trust my experience and imagination to bring me difficult things to write about, as they always have, and I will continue to do everything I can to do the subject justice, and get inside the heads of people who are different from me. It’s one of the things I love about writing.
You make a fair point about every time being the time to talk about racism – I concede that willingly – but for me, white male IS the default, in that I AM one. That doesn’t mean that’s all I write about, but sometimes it DOES take a conscious effort to get out of that, and trying to avoid who I am in all my writing would be foolish.
It’s important to me, but there are only so many things I can do at once.
Right now I’m trying to learn how to see the world from the point of view of an M-F transgender woman, and create a story in which that character is believable from that point of view, but it’s not easy, never having been there myself. She’s white, because that’s what she is right now. That might change, but if I decided to just change her skin color for the sake of changing her skin color, it would be forced. Not all my characters are white, but not every story is going to have every ethnicity in it. I’m not interested in “token” characters, I want people, and trying to force them in general creates tokens.
I honestly can’t imagine creating a whole novel just to explore other perspectives. Maybe somebody has done that and done it well, but I’m not sure I could – I don’t think I’m that good yet. I write the stories and explore the characters as they come, and maybe it’s a quirk of my own mind, but they DO come, and I DO end up doing research just to make sure that I’m not creating a world defined solely by my own life experience and perspective.
Sometimes it’s also hard not to feel like an impostor when you’re doing that. People DO pick things apart, and if I get something wrong in writing a transgender character, I’m pretty sure it will be attributed to some degree of bigotry or prejudice, or lack of effort. I could see that fear preventing some people from trying to write from the point of view of someone whose life has been so different from their own.
I’m not sure how much of a point there was there, except that I sometimes feel like people expect authors to get EVERYTHING right in EVERY story they tell, and I’m not sure that’s reasonable, especially given the number of things out there that one can get wrong. I’m sure Rowling COULD have done more, but sometimes it seems like there’s no end to that.
Have you not been following what’s been going on in Hollywood lately?
No. I try really, really hard not to know what’s going on in Hollywood. Reflecting on my recent movie experience, it’s been extremely heavy on the Miyazaki and David Attenborough.
Full disclosure: I am white. Apparently you are not? I still think that what you said is an excellent example of the abandonment of critical reasoning in the defense of unconscious privilege. There’s simply no reason to think that Rowling was bucking the widespread, well-documented trend of putting white as the default and noting race only when it deviates from the white norm. No reason at all. I apologize if I misread your intentions, but I still think my assessment of what you were actually doing–not using critical reasoning, that is, and in defense of JK Rowling, a white author who undoubtedly possesses white privilege–was accurate.
I doubt there ever could be an end to asking people to be better at combating their unconscious prejudices, humans being what they are. But I don’t see how that is a bad thing. It’s just one of things we have to live with, like knowing that we have to brush our teeth every day, or keeping in mind that we say stupid things when we’re angry, or remembering that our brains are predisposed to see patterns where there are none.
Oh, and I think Dianne was assuming that that was what I was talking about, not you, and she’s close.
Also, I fail at HTML
Why did you assume that that’s what I wanted?
Because the book being described talked about including one character of each gender, race, etc who is equally strong with all the others. That approach strikes me as more likely to lead to stereotyping than actual, believable characters.
I specifically mentioned white women and PoC writing convincing white male characters, and questioned why white men aren’t expected to be capable of the same feats of empathy.
Well, if it’s an actual question, not a rhetorical one, I’d say it’s because white men have never had to. Women and minorities and especially minority women can’t ignore white men. White men are everywhere, always dominating the conversation. You can’t help but notice them, no matter how much you’d like to not notice them. For example: can you think of any book, movie, or other work of fiction that would fail the “reverse Bechdel” test, i.e. in which there are no examples of two male characters, talking to each other, about something other than a woman? I can come up with examples, but they’re few and far between. Even Bechdel’s opus, which was specifically written to force men to identify with female protagonists, includes examples of two men talking to each other, about something other than women. Especially her later work.
In contrast, it’s very easy for men to ignore women and white people to ignore minorities. Minorities are often literally elsewhere (not living in your neighborhood, not working at your place of employment) and women are often in the background. The secretary, not the CEO. The nurse, not the doctor (or, more recently, the intern, not the attending). People who don’t have to be included in the story. And, if a white man writes something, his inclusion of women or minorities when he has spent his whole life ignoring real women and minorities is likely to come across as forced and condescending.
Yes, I get that. I just choose to question the assumption that asking people with privilege (and that includes all of us) to step back from their experiences and make a deliberate effort to consider, and perhaps include, perspectives from people who don’t get to experience that privilege, automatically means that we’re heading for some stupid tokenism, where you get one of each, and they all conform to a certain stereotype, etc. I mean, I hope that was clear from my response to you. Dianne’s response gave me the opportunity to make that even clearer.
Hey StevoR, I think you might want to read this.
I think PZ’s reading the cartoon backward. I think that because as soon as Kenan said “the black one,” I thought, “Which one?” myself, because I thought of Lee Jordan and Dean Thomas right away. And when you go to the tumblr linked, the person says,
I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement in the HP series, but it’s DEFINITELY better than LotR for race and gender issues (not that there’s really anywhere to go but up, from LotR).
It was, in fact, more rhetorical than anything else, but it’s still worth answering, and I’m glad you did.
To a large extent I agree with abe.
As far as LoTR goes: Lord of the Rings seems to be a somewhat difficult case when discussing racism in books and movies. There is no doubt that Tolkien had some problematic attitudes when it comes to race and to some extent, this has to do with the time he lived in. This is something which in a modern movie could be ignored. One could insert people of verious ethnic background in the film version. However, with a film like this, there is another problem, in that what you have here is a fantasy world heavily rooted in Celtic, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology. A sort of mythological version of a ‘prehistoric’ europe. It kinda makes sense that in such a setting there would be little or no black people (by which I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been black people in these movies or that the lack thereof was a good thing). I guess what I’m saying is that while equal treatment of ethnicities should become the norm in the whole movie business, there are times when the settings and artistic background of the story being told might make this a problem. Suppose one was to make a movie about viking invaders on the British coast in the middle ages. In such a story, there probably wouldn’t be any black people, just because there were virtually no black people around at that place or time.
I see it as a bad thing in that it’s somewhat discouraging to have people railing against “unconscious prejudice” if you’re doing everything you can think of to be conscious of your prejudices and privileges. I realize that’s a risk you take in putting your work out there, but it’s rather hard to have every error and omission interpreted as being because of prejudice. The default assumption seems to be that an effort wasn’t made in the first place.
Apparently you are not?
Nope, not entirely. Though I must admit that I have benefited from people’s assumptions about my race, which were based on my “winning” the genetic lottery and being the most anglo looking of my family. Be that as it may, as you pointed out in another thread, shockingly, not being white does not make one perfectly enlightened about race.
abe:
Suggestions: Become a regular, and ask here or in TET for a reading, if you don’t already have a helpful reader in real life.
And, read as much as you can find FROM real people with that point of view, since they do exist.
I’m blunt but I do sympathize. I try and write my critters from diverse (mostly alien) viewpoints, and I get scared, but it’s important that storytellers of all stripes at least try.
QFT.
It was – MY point was that if I started plugging in characters to meet all the various perspectives, it WOULD be tokenism. If I happen to end up with a story that includes everybody and makes everybody happy, then I’ll take my pulitzer and be thrilled, but as it stands, I don’t have that story. I have individual stories that have different characters in them, and some of them are very different from myself (if I write them well). I’m sure that when my first novel is published, people will blame the absence of SOMETHING on my unconscious prejudices, no matter how much effort I make, and no matter how much time I spent consciously working on the things I’m accused of ignoring. That seems to be the way of it, and I do find it rather irksome when I see it happening.
This is true, and I’m glad that people are talking about trying, but it’s also incredibly important that privileged people writing the marginalized Other (no matter how well-researched) don’t have their voices promoted over the voices of the marginalized people writing themselves, and writing about the world from their own perspective. Some good information can be found by looking up RaceFail ’09 in the online speculative fiction community.
Sure; but why should that stop you? Do the homework, spend real thought and time considering real people’s viewpoints, then do the best you can in good faith, and if and when you screw up, learn from the criticism and do better next time. (Yeah, I wish it were that easy. Still worth considering.)
You mean “token” black guy. -snark- This is hollywood we are talking about.
All good advice, and I DO do that. I’m fortunate to have had friends from most of the viewpoints I’ve explored so far who’ve been willing to audit some of my work, as well, and Natalie over on Skepchick (now Queereka, I guess) has been, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a godsend.
It helped, for my first female characters, that I’d been with a feminist who spend the better part of seven years educating me on her perspective, and who’s still willing to help me with that, though I’m sure there will still be women who don’t like my female characters, and so on.
Yes, I agree that the Harry Potter films are a festival whiteness. As are most films these days. A quick jaunt on Sociological Images and looking at their ‘movie’-tagged entries will illustrate this fact.
The original Harry Potter books are not, however. If JK Rowling is such a scathing racist like some of you are making her out to be, then how come Kingsley Shacklebolt became the Minister of Magic when at the story’s conclusion? And this book came out before Barack Obama got elected, let alone became internationally known…. just keep in mind.
Why even give a multi-cultural presence in the stories at all? Like the Quiddich World Cup?
Why make the main morals of the story about fighting against racism and emphasizing the respect of cultural diversity?
If we’re going to jump on JKR’s case because Harry Potter’s immediate peer group (his core of friends) are all white, then I guess if I wrote down a fictionalized account of my upbringing then I would be a racist as well. Sorry that I live in Southwest Missouri? That there are literally no black people here? There are some communities, some countries/regions that just does not afford the racial diversity that allows for the chance for there being more African/Asian Americans for me to grow up and interact with. Some people do not exist in a sociological/economic state where they can even escape such areas. I’m comfortably nestled just above the poverty line. I can’t move away from the cesspool of whiteness to somewhere that allows me the opportunity to befriend the requisite ‘one or two non-white people’ that will magically stop my life from being a parable of white supremacy.
And I’m sure that people would like to point out then, “but it’s a fictionalization, right? Then prove that you’re not racist by making half of your friends non-white in the story!” But if it’s a fictionalization of my upbringing based on my experiences, I risk the credibility of my story. “So a girl in the Ozarks has precisely 2 white friends, 2 friends who are Kenyan foreign exchange students, and one 3rd-generation Korean-american friend? Huh.” If I did start writing about having peers that I never actually had, I run the risk of writing about people who cease to be believable to the readers, especially when I’m pressed to go into details about them as characters. What if I write the 3rd generation Korean-American friend has trouble with an inexplicable thick accent? What if one of the Kenyan exchange students behaves less like someone an African who is experiencing culture shock and more like a stereotype of African Americans? Yes, it’d be bad writing. But honestly, how could I (or someone in my situation) not write the story like that, being that I’ve never had an experience in reality to base these characters on yet I’m pressured to PC-ize my story to prove that I’m not a racist?
The happy compromise is that they are supporting characters at best. Yes, it’s a shame that they’re not the stars of the show, or toting alongside the main character. But in my case, I risk the chance of bad characterization. In ENG 110 classes across the country, the teachers drill into you, write what you know, and they do so for this precise reason. Writing what you know does not make you racist. If what you know results in a disgusting treatment of said incidental non-white characters, then you can probably judge the character of the author. Speaking of which….
As for the Lord of the Rings trilogy being superior, I submit this to the court as evidence: http://arsmarginal.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/deconstructing-pointy-eared-white-supremacists/
Tolkein may have had the same problem I illustrated above in my example, but he crossed a line where he began to bemoan the fall of perfect white society (ie, British Empire) in allegory.
Abe, I think the most anyone can ask is that you try, which you appear to be doing. If you still get criticism, well, you can evaluate whether the criticism is valid, and take it in as a helpful aid to improving your writing in the future if so, and disregard it if not. The important thing is that you engage in the process.
Given the preponderance of evidence, that is a reasonable default assumption, in most cases. That means there’s a bit of a burden on people who are, like you, genuinely trying, to make it absolutely clear that they are making the effort because they genuinely consider it important. This burden is unfair; however, it is a burden imposed on you by the racism in society, not the people trying to fight it.
I’m sorry, but at this point your entire argument is against a strawman. Nobody is calling JKR “a scathing racist.” Saying that someone has unconscious racist assumptions due to living in a racist society, and they creep into her writing, is not the same as saying she is “a racist” and denying all anti-racist sentiment she may have.
Classical Cipher, thanks for the link to RaceFail ’09… that’s a massive amount of information I need to parse.
and I didn’t quite grasp this, which means I need to back off, listen, and go educate myself with all that reading. I think I came very close to screwing up with my previous simplistic enthusiasm, neh?
There is a lot of American chauvinism going on in this thread. Especially notable that our experience of white privilege or racism is the same experience as exists elsewhere. This seems to be an unstated assumption in the argument that hasn’t been supported.
@Angelabredar, is the town you grew up in one of these towns?
There are historical reasons that some towns have zero people of color, and other towns are completely dominated by people of color. The moral of your story might not be that you are a crusading racist, but that you are unconsciously racist, because you grew up in a racist town which, a generation or two ago, took an institutional decision (enforced by violence) to exclude all people of color from being able to rent or own property there.
In other words, yes you may be racist–in fact it’s extremely likely that you are. But there’s no need to get defensive about it, since very little of it is under your conscious control. However, now it’s been pointed out to you, and you obviously have access to the internet, so now you have the opportunity to become educated and hopefully get rid of some of those racist stereotypes knocking around in your subconscious.
@abe
How about rather than defaulting to white male protagonists you roll die on a trait chart and use that as the default unless the plot requires a change?
I get that.
It’s a little bit like how I try to be a decent, non-creepy guy, but our culture is such that a woman meeting me for the first time has no way of knowing that I’m not dangerous. It hurts a little, but it’s in no way her fault.
I guess I’m just not at the stage, with the writing/prejudice thing where I’m comfortable not pointing out that just because YOU can’t see the effort doesn’t mean it’s not there, and while the default assumption IS likely to be correct, by the numbers, it’s worth exploring the possibility that whatever the result, there WAS an effort made.
I also feel, every time I bring something like this up, that I’m coming off as another white guy complaining about how hard it is that he’s expected to acknowledge privilege. I hope that’s not the impression I’ve been giving.
@angelabredar:
One thing I would like to say in response is that while you may be right about that, Tolkein’s elves were based of of an existing mythology in the British Isles, in which the elves/fae/fairies WERE unnaturally white/fair of skin, and considered to be unnaturally beautiful, possibly because of some magical attraction about them. That is an old, old part of British folklore, as is the description of their appearance. If you want a better, and in my opinion more interesting, exploration of that, I’d suggest reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (possibly the best fantasy novel ever written, IMO).
Tolkien may well have been doing a white supremacy thing – it certainly bothers me the amount of effort he puts into the blackness of the bad guys – but he was also incorporating something of the folklore of HIS heritage, and I think it’s worth including that in any calculation – something that the author of the piece you linked does not seem to do. The end result might be the same, but he didn’t invent the elves, he borrowed them and added to the concept.
*laugh* yes because the British NEEEEEEEEVER have had a problem with privilege and entitlement.
@Abe
In the original mythical roots though Dwarves were possibly black skinned.
@108: That’s an obtuse reading of what I wrote. I see people assuming the UK’s problems with racism and privilege are the same experiences Americans have, even using the same language we use to talk about racism in America. This though there’s a different mix of people in a different set of proportions with a largely different history.
@Captaintripps
I fail to see how two cultures that were one in the same save for recent history could be described as having “largely different history”
Of course. That is why the new King Arthur series has to have two of them, one as the “main” character Guinevere needs to be black, for no logical reason, and, despite the fact that its about as probable, for the time depicted, as finding a lightsaber, there is also a token black on the “round table” knights list. lol
Seriously though, bloody idiot argument imho. Most of the racial diversity you get in movies is token equlity, right up there with the “token chick” syndrome. So, we need to whine about ***every*** film not feeling the need to tokenize the whole damn thing? ::head-desk::
@We Are Ing: Then you’re largely ignorant of one or both culture’s histories. That one stems from the other and they interacted with each other does not mean their histories or sociological patterns are the same or even nearly identical
I always vote yes for more reading, but I could also try writing more clearly :) Let me try with a specific example: It’s super cool and wonderful that Stieg Larsson wrote a powerful and complex woman character, who is also a rape and abuse survivor marginalized by her label of mental illness. But I’m guessing that if Lisbeth Salander existed and wrote a novel using her perspective, it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same popularity as Larsson’s writing. It would probably be stuck into niche fiction. See also the Tim Wise problem – a white guy talking about race is going to get a better reception and greater visibility than a black guy saying the same things. These things are problematic.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, knock it off. This is basically defending tokenism. and why go after the films, which only really reflect the books? Was Ron black in the book? Dumbledore? Ridiculous. This is the kind of thing that causes sensible people to lose patience with the left. It happened in the early eighties (at least in the UK) and it’s bloody depressing to see that particular self-defeating political wheel come full circle again.
Also, Guinevere means “White spirit”, which is racist. Probably! Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some soft-liberal American numpty actually tried to make that case.
Oh, Jack Rawlinson. Always here to defend privilege with self-righteous obliviousness. You’re a gem. How is it “defending tokenism” to ask for more central and realistic roles for people of color in popular entertainment?
Hey, CaptainTripps? I’m open to your perspective that this discussion is too America-centric, but unfortunately your posts are next to useless to me at this point because you’re not actually explaining why or how.
See, now you’re making me want to quantify this in my head and see if that really IS the default. Sorry about thinking out loud, but I have some vague feeling that this might, in some way, be useful to the conversation. Also, it’s hard for ME to see my own prejudices, since they’re generally located behind my eyeballs till I do something like this.
A quick tally of protagonists (or close to protagonists) in two novels and a few short stories gives me the following, in no particular order:
Nine characters who could be assumed to be cis white males originating from various parts of Europe, though four are not described as such. One male of asian heritage.
Eight women, four of which are white, two of which are bi (one might be lesbian), one is of Mexican heritage, one isn’t described, I had a vague image of asian in my head, but it never made it into the story, one is transgender (and white), one is Maasai.
One squirrel, male
One lizard, male (usually)
One dwarf type character who is probably European.
One “stream spirit” who’s made of stone, and lives in Tanzania.
I suppose you could make an argument that white male is my default, since it’s the single most represented group.
I’m not going to roll the dice, because I don’t tend to sit down and create characters intentionally, I tend to get parts of stories or whole stories, characters included, in my head, and I write them down.
When I AM uncertain of a character’s race/gender/orientation, I tend to think about what would suit the character well, and what I feel like I’ve written too much of. It looks like maybe I’ve written too many white people without knowing it, so I should spend some time thinking about that.
“In the UK we don’t have black characters in central roles. It just isn’t done! That’s why this instance isn’t remarkable.”
@Classical Cipher, thanks. I might’ve read your comment as more of a smackdown than I had any right to. ;>
Okay… so basically (and simplistically), a privileged author needs to be aware of this disparity, and, what… use extra caution and humility? In addition to putting the necessary study and consideration into the work in the first place?
I’m really, really interested to see how the geekosphere discussion about George Lucas and “Red Tails” plays out with all this in mind. Obviously, a mainstream movie with an all-black cast wouldn’t be happening if a rich powerful white dude (who’s also made major racefails in his work) hadn’t decided to make it so.
In defense of LOTR: Aside from the above mentioned fact that Tolkien was a product of his time, and was in fact attempting to recreate a mythology to replace England’s original mythos that had been lost in the process of various conquests (and thus would not involve, by sheer geography, people of non-English/British/European descent. I mean, really, should you expect an African or Indian or Asian person to show up in a story of the Tuatha De Danann or Beowulf? No.) Peter Jackson’s goal in creating the movies was to stick to the books as much as possible, including their flaws. That he did what he did with the female characters was deviation enough.
And as for the Orcs and Uruk-hai… these races are not supposed to be representatives of deformed people, or mentally ill people, or people of color, or anything else. These are monsters, in the most literal sense. They are literal embodiments of Evil, with a capital E. Machines completely and utterly incapable of reason, mercy, compassion, love, remorse, or any other emotion recognizable as “good”. If you wanted, you could consider them as biological weapons. Like a genetically engineered virus or bacteria, created by Sauron (or Saruman) for the sole purpose of mindless destruction. Except, in this case, Sauron was “engineering” elves into orcs.
The Haradrim are a bit more grey. They ARE humans who have sided with Sauron for whatever benefit they believe they will get out of the deal, perhaps forced into it under threat of invasion (I don’t believe their motives were ever discussed in either the books or the movies.) Faramir does cast a sympathetic light on them in The Two Towers, reminding Sam and Frodo that these are just human beings, with friends and families, forced into desperate situations, just like them. At least in the movie, I don’t remember that particular exchange in the books, but it’s been a looong time.
Hey Abe, no mention of the orientations of your guys? *nudge nudge* ~;>
@Tenebras
A quick word on the orcs – they are actually LITERALLY deformed people, in their origin, but probably not the way you meant.
The orcs began as Elves that Sauron’s old boss corrupted, tortured, and twisted until they became orcs, and became the “dark shadow” of the elves, as it were. Sort of like Trolls are imitations of Ents, in that world.
Given the manner in which the various wizarding communities are described as having held themselves separate from muggles for the last 400-odd years, it would make sense that the wizarding communities in India, east Asia, and Africa would not have been subject to the same socio-economic factors which led to the movement of muggles from those regions to the UK. This would tend to lead to most of the wizards of colour at Hogwarts being either Muggle-born or at most a few generations removed. It would definitely tend towards a lower percentage of visible minorities at the school.
All that said, the reality of life in many areas of the English-speaking world is one of relative segregation. While the 3 main characters had friends and classmates of various ethnicities, it is reasonable that all 3 of them, taken from the general population of the UK would be white. If they Rowling had written One of her characters as black, or if Hermione had been cast as black, there would have been accusations of tokenism.
I think there is a need for a different term. Calling someone racist conjures images of David Duke and the KKK, where several commenters above, and SallyStrange in particular are talking about cultural bias born out of a segregated upbringing. I’m sorry, but “Born in small-town America? You are probably racist.” will only ever make people defensive. It is a loaded term, much like sexist. I’ve noticed people using “privilege” to indicate innate sexism where it is noted, and while this isn’t quite the same thing, it strikes me that a similar term is needed.
@Pteryxx – sorry, I thought I did. One is gay, and his partner-to-be hasn’t showed up in the story so I didn’t include him, two, as far as I can recall, are described as straight, and the rest have no romantic interaction, so most people would assume, as with the characters whose appearance I don’t describe, that they’re whatever I am, so probably straight.
A potentially interesting complication for analyzing the Harry Potter oeuvre on these issues is that there’s an axis of racial supremacy/racial oppression that’s entirely distinct from what we Muggles think of as “race.” Yes, the three main protagonists are stereotypically white middle-class British kids… but in the context of the fictional universe, they’re also equivalent to a mulatto (aka half-blood), a nigger (aka mudblood), and a nigger-lovin’ race traitor (aka blood traitor). It’s not entirely clear to me that this isn’t a good (if slightly subversive) way to get stereotypically white middle-class British (and, of course, American) kids thinking about prejudice and privilege in a way they’re not culturally well equipped to easily do.
Also, of course the evil pureblood faction lacks ethnic diversity: They’re proudly inbred racial supremacists; what should they be other than totally nondiverse? If Rowling had wanted to really push the literary envelope, she could’ve inverted real-world stereotypes by making the purebloods all be black (or Indian or Chinese or whatever), in the way that D.H. Lawrence inverted the traditional archetypal significance of fair and dark women in his fiction[1]. But that would’ve been a risky move, especially in children’s/YA books, in that it would’ve been too easy for non Lit Majors to mistake her intent for actual racism (“She made all the bad characters black! WTF??”). Of course, by my own logic, they need not have been homogenous in terms of Muggle-world “race” — as I say, wizard/muggle is a distinct “racial” axis from white/nonwhite — but an ethnically diverse group of racial supremacists might’ve been confusing to young Muggle readers.
***
[1] The topic of one of the few of my undergrad English papers whose topic I can still remember.
I’ve never sounded this out before, so please be aware that I’m only feeling my way gingerly myself. But in my experience (subjective)…class has always seemed to be a bigger thing than race in the UK. There have always been problems with racists, bigots, idiots and dodgy coppers…but being of the same class as someone tends to confer a sort of solidarity in a way that I’m not sure the US has experienced. Perhaps because segregation was enforced so rigidly in the US for so long? I’ve heard stories from the olduns in WWII of US servicemen, used to seperate facilities, refusing to share the same mess as black British soldiers and the white British soldiers shouting them down…I don’t know. If you’re a mate, you’re a mate, regardless of who you are. Maybe (despite many problems) the Commonwealth meant that you were a British Citizen, part of the larger British culture/family…
Shoot me down. I’m unsure. I’m in no way denying that, like every country, we have a majority vs. minority race problem…however, the US always seemed to be more polarised in racial division.
@Tenebras By and large, I agree with what your saying. The particular exchange between Faramir and the two hobbits isn’t in the book as such, but the same sentiment towards the Haradrim is expressed elsewhere in the book at one point I believe (though reading the book is quite a while back so I can’t fully remember when and in what context).
@ angelabredar:
1. It’s Tolkien, not Tolkein. Rhymes with “keen”.
2. Tolkien’s LOTR, a way to bemoan the fall of the British Empire? In the eye of the beholder, maybe… and only if you forget that the bulk of this material was written before the British lost their empire! Even though the LOTR was published in 1954-55, Tolkien wrote it between 1937 and 1949, also re-using in his composition bits of earlier tales (as yet unpublished) some of whom dated as far back as 1916.
What’s more, if one is actually interested in Tolkien’s ideas and outlook, try reading the Letters. While he was definitely what we’d call conservative, he was the first to say that he had no interest of the rise or fall of the Empire, or even in the supremacy of British culture… because his references were even older than that! He was a staunch Roman Catholic, and thus saw himself both as a member of a minority in England, and as a member of a culture older and nobler than the United Kingdom. He once described the restored kingdom of Gondor at the end of the LOTR as “a return to the Holy Roman Empire, but with its capital in Rome”!
As for the “perfect white society”, hummm. Sorry, but no. The Last Free People fighting against Sauron in the LOTR are not only multi-racial, but they are a multi-species group, with Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Humans and even the Ents, who are closer to trees than to humans. And among each species, you have several different ethnic groups, differing in looks, language and traditions, but all united by a common belief. The humans on the side of Good, for instance, include the tall, blonde-haired Riders of Rohan as well as the “swarthy, squat” Woses, or Wild People of the woods. In the end, even the humans who were fighting under the banner of Sauron (the “savage” Easterners and the black-skinned Haradrim), in the end, are freed by the fall of the tyrant and come to see the light.
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Tolkien’s was a Christian mythology, but not a race-based one.
@abe
No, not what I meant by “deformed”, although I guess that is a technically correct word to use to describe the orcs. I think “engineered” might be a slightly better description, although not the one Tolkien used. “Deformed” tends to imply an accidental nature, whereas “engineered” is purposeful.
@Emrysmyrddin I don’t know all that much about Britain and the class vs. race thing, but I can confirm about those WWII stories. Many American soldiers and airmen were very unaccustomed to the way British soldiers seemed to interact with each other regardless of race.
@Abe, no problemo, I’m mostly teasing. (And just way too happy to be having such a discussion at all.)
Point of order… IMHO, it’s important for the author to know each character in some depth, even when that information never comes into the story at all. So, I’d make a distinction between characters having no orientation (or race, class, whatever) as far as YOU the author know, and characters having no orientation etc. that the audience ever sees. Dumbledore’s the obvious example here.
When I began writing about my alien critters, way back in grade school, at some point I realized that all major characters in everything were male, including mine. (Science fiction being worse than usual in that regard.) So, I decided to explain it by making my entire species 99% male, which borks their gender roles. They’re also mostly gay or bi, tend to be biased against straight males, and make embarrassing cultural assumptions about the females of more equally-represented species. I’m working on getting it ship-shape, now that I’m something resembling a grown-up.
So, of my major triad of characters, one’s gay, one’s strictly gay, and the third is straight, which the other two pity him for. But none of this comes into the story at all, except for a few comments and gestures that look odd in an action context.
Hmmm… maybe a better example than Lawrence of the kind of literary inversion I talked about @126 would be Dance of the Tiger by Björn Kurtén, a novel of the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon that came out at roughly the same time as the more-famous Clan of the Cave Bear (but Dance was written by an actual scientist).
Kurtén depicted the Neanderthals as light-skinned and the Cro-Magnons as dark, and they’re referred to withing the story as Whites and Blacks, respectively. Apparently there is (or was at the time; the book is now more than 3 decades old) some DNA evidence that this depiction is correct, but IIRC Kurtén also had a literary interest in confounding — and thus highlighting and questioning — modern stereotypes around “primitive” dark people versus “civilized” whites.
Of course, Dance was never intended as a children’s book.
I’m a bit late to the party, but to be frank, with the walking national stereotypes in the Harry Potter series (the gruff Slavs from Durmstrang, the French girls from Beauxbatons, McGonagall the über Scot, and so on) and the terribly clichéd and tired world-building details like wizards in the Middle East using flying carpets, I’m almost glad that JKR didn’t decide to add “cute” touches to the POC characters. This woman can only do flat or cliché.
On a different note, it would be nice if someone decided to film Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (Anansi as in the West African trickster deity), but the last time Hollywood contacted him about it they asked him if the could turn the characters Caucasian, so we’ll be waiting for a bit :/
Whu..? O.O
Well, the ones that have no in-depth description are in short stories, most less than a thousand words.
The problem is with this is that Hollywood isn’t that bright. They like to buy *other* people’s stories, which already have a bias, and then either rewrite it, like the Moonsea thing, to be more white, or be honest and write it *as intended*. What is being asked when saying, “Lets not have so much tokenism, but actually have real characters”, **is** tokenism anyway, since it would mean reworking the whole story, so that it has different characters than those in the original work they are adapting.
Yeah, some of them have real writers, but not many. Its less costly to buy rights to someone else’s work, then mangle that, than create new content. And, the older the content, the “cheaper” it is to buy/borrow it for a movie, or TV show, etc.
So, you can be honest about the original content, or you can be purely tokenistic, or you can be *hyper*-tokenistic, and change most/everyone. Honest, apparently, gets you called, “borderline racist, for not including characters, or colors, that didn’t exist in the original”. Which is, seriously absurd.
Emrysmyrddin @135: Yep. He told it in an interview.
Irene:
As an English-speaker who’s studied German, the rhyming mnemonic wouldn’t help me much, since German and English sound ie and ei in opposite ways. Pronouncing names that end in -stein has always been a bugbear for me.
Wow, thanks for blatantly ignoring the numerous instances where people were explicitly pointing out that pointing out racism in someone’s writing or speech is definitely NOT like accusing them of being a KKK member like David Duke.
No, it’s more like, “You weren’t raised by wolves? You’re probably racist.”
No, what we need is for people to become educated about racism and sexism, so that they don’t take it as a personal indictment of their moral decrepitude. I don’t think there’s any possible way to inform someone that they’re acting out of bias or privilege without making them defensive. Possible defensiveness is emphatically not an argument for avoiding speaking the truth.
Yeah, pteryxx, I wasn’t smacking at you :)
I feel like this is an open question and a bit of an open wound, from what I understand of RaceFail ’09. It’s especially hard to say what writers who are kind of small-time should do in their capacity as writers, aside from aforementioned attempts at research, sensitivity, and openness to criticism. As readers, obviously, we might try to counteract the tendency by reading and promoting books by people from marginalized groups writing about their experiences as members of those groups. (I am not particularly good about this myself.) Popular, visible authors definitely have some responsibility to point readers, as much as they can, toward authors in their genre writing from a different perspective from their own. I feel like PZ does a good job of this with promoting women bloggers.
—
The impact of the persistent centering of popular fiction on the white, European experience (the popularity of worlds like Tolkien’s) is explained awesomely in I Didn’t Dream of Dragons. Like, it’s all well and good to say that Tolkien and Rowling were working with fantasies set in fantasy England/ but we should ask the broader question: why are fantasies set in fantasy England so successful? What is it that they do for readers? And what are the impacts of their success?
Classical Cipher: the link’s broken, but I Googled it; thanks, it was interesting reading, and bookmarked :)
Whoops! Thanks for letting me know, Emrysmyrddin. Here’s that link again.
Classical Cipher, Murmur Muris, OM #141
*Shrug* So how many authors from outside the Anglosphere do you read in translation? Read some wuxia novels lately? Some Franco-Belgian bande désinée, even?
Fantasy England is alright, but there are other epic traditions around. I doubt Bollywood cares a bit about King Arthur when they do their epics.
…Holy moley, Cipher, thank you for that link.
I need to understand this, because right now I’m working with a fictional species controlled by another, dominant one, trying to sort out how that’s affected both their cultures. That’s shallow of me, but I can work on making it less so; maybe even to the point where it’s worthwhile.
Reread twice and this seems to have no barring on my comment which was a) not abut Hollywood, and b) about creating future works.
@SallyStrange – You parsed my sentence somewhat oddly. First you call me out for “blatantly ignoring” the manner in which the term racist was being used, then quote back the other half of my sentence, where I spell out how you, in particular, are using the term. I completely understand (and I think I spelled this out) that you are not equating people with David Duke by calling them on the tropes they use in their writing or speech. I’m talking about what people hear.
In discussions of sexism, which I’ve been following here and elsewhere across FtB, there is at least a small range of terms used, from calling something mildly sexist to outright misogynist (or misandrist, for that matter). We don’t have terms for that in discussions of race and race representation in literature and pop culture. The term racist becomes a mighty wide brush with which to paint people. Unfortunately, it is stained from end to end with the taint of groups such as the KKK, making it less useful in conversation with people who are simply showing some bias.
I agree that anyone not raised by wolves is going to have some racial bias, but to call them racist sounds knee-jerk to me, and seems to invite dismissal as such. Those raised by wolves are probably going to be speciesist, though.
Cmv, I was using the term ‘racist’ over and over again with the caveat that I’m not saying that ‘racist’ means you’re a KKK member. Yet you went ahead and said, “People are going to think you’re accusing them of being a KKK member.” Yeah, okay, they might think that if they’re stupid or something, since I went out of my way to explain that that is not what I mean when I say racist. Several times.
I’ll see your David Duke and raise you a Mel Gibson.
As for the three main protagonists, there is one of each: Half-blood, Pure-blood, and Muggle-born. You can’t get fairer than that.
Well, unless you count ancient Rome and Greece, not many. I’m a privileged white person from one of the most homogenous regions of the infamously provincial United States – I don’t have to know anything about other cultures. (I’m working on it.) How many people outside the Anglosphere do you think have read Harry Potter and LotR? HP has been translated into 67 languages. If you’d read the essay linked above, I think you’d see that this is part of the problem: the disproportionate popularity and ubiquity of “fantasy England” narratives, due to cultural imperialism and colonialism.
No, it’s that mainstream American culture is averse to most anything from outside the Anglosphere, up to the point of making all-American remakes of any interesting thing they see abroad rather than showing the originals, like Takashi Miike’s horror films or more recently Let The Right One In or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And when they show the originals, they alienate the audience leaving it subbed, like Pan’s Labyrinth.
It’s more visible with films, but in literature, comics or (to a lesser degree) music it’s not so different, too.
But what I wanted to say is that I know about King Arthur but when I was a kid I read about Capitán Trueno and Astérix. You just aren’t aware that other countries have their own traditional epics and their cultural markets aren’t monopolized by American imports.
SallyStrange, I know you did. And as I read through, time after time, as you explained just how you meant the term, it struck me that there has to be a better way. If the term is so strongly predefined that you recognize that you have to attach a caveat to it in order to use it in the way you want to, then a new term is needed.
I used you as the example of someone who was using the term in a somewhat novel way (as opposed to how people often hear it). If a word needs an additional sentence just to clarify its meaning, it may not be the right word to use. I’m not sure what is the right word, but there you go.
Well, that’s just part of the education process, cmv. I suppose I could say “racially prejudiced” or “racially biased” or something along those lines, but honestly, I have tried it and the responses don’t differ very much. I honestly think it’s a valuable part of the process of learning about racism to realize that even nice people who bake cookies and donate to United Way and would never say “nigger”, much less burn a cross on someone’s lawn, can still be racist. I think getting to the point where the constant caveats aren’t necessary is a more reasonable goal than inventing a whole new term to mean “racist in the way that supports institutional racism” as opposed “racist in the way that people who beat black people to death are”. Both are expression of the same systemic oppression. They’re on a spectrum, which is why it may actually be a good thing that we use the same word for them.
Subtitles are alienating? I find they spare me from irritating dubbing and bad voice acting…
Fair enough, SallyStrange. I can see where you are coming from.
As I alluded to before, I’m a classicist, so… am too! :P
You clearly did have access to a lot of work that wasn’t whitewashed or based in fantasy England; I’m not trying to say you didn’t. But I’m getting from the above-linked essay (especially in the section quoted by pteryxx) the impression that there are places in which this does not occur, or occurs less than people would like. Do we disagree on that? With regard to the xenophobia of American pop culture, I feel like we might be in violent agreement.
*lightbulb moment*
Like Smurfette Syndrome.
Again like Smurfette Syndrome.
:-D
Yes – most importantly for a different reason: he was not the science officer, nor even the engineer! He was the security officer!
*trying to pick up jaw from floor*
*failing to find it*
I don’t think I’ve ever before been glad about the fact that stuff gets lost in translation.
Category error. Not having read the books or watched the films, I haven’t got an opinion on either, but if the films were crap, well, even the best actors can’t save crap from being crap. :-|
That’s a neurotypical thing to say. :-)
*diving under table*
Of course he became internationally known early during his campaign. People didn’t wake up one Wednesday and noticed the USA suddenly had a black president.
AFAIK, the UK has something more like a continental European xenophobia issue than the US racism issue. To talk about it in American terms distorts it somewhat.
Not that I know of (…and… 3 decades ago, Neandertaler DNA was completely unknown), but the ancestors of the Neandertalers had been living in high latitudes for hundreds of thousands of years, while the Cro-Magnon folks had fairly recently arrived from Africa, so the assumption makes sense and is fairly commonly made.
Seconded.
Not even only those. Tolkien mostly did the German translation of LOTR himself… so that now everyone who reads fantasy in German was familiar with specifically English elves decades before the films came out.
Asterix was very popular here for decades.
If dubbing is irritating, you’re doing it wrong.
Dubbing does, of course, hide things. See above.
Well, I’ve never seen dubs that WEREN’T irritating, so I guess I’ve never seen it done well
Blaise Zabini is an interesting character in how he was perceived by fans. Rowling didn’t actually reveal he was black until The Half Blood Prince. Before that readers assumed he was white, perhaps Italian. Not to mention that many readers, at least in North America, thought he was a she given that Rowling didn’t mention a gender. Unfortunately a lot of fans were upset at the revelation, leading to a lot of racist wanking from the especially dull ones.
As several others have pointed out in the comments there is no shortage of memorable minor characters, who are black, in the films and books, (my favourite is Lee Jordan) and the demographic resembles what you would expect of English boarding schools. Although that in itself is somewhat strange since presumably magical ability is not racially sensitive, so the demographic should have been approximating the national average. In any case, let’s assume that’s an oversight on Rowling’s part rather than maliciousness.
PZ clarified:
“The objection is that there is no significant, memorable, important black character in the Potter movies.”
I’m not sure how to measure the importance of characters. I’m assuming characters from “pure-blood” fanatical families can’t be black, since I’m assuming – perhaps incorrectly – that the cognitive dissonance would kill them outright. That rules most of the “evil” important characters and some of the goodies like Sirius and Dumbledore. I suppose McGonagall could have been black but she isn’t THAT important. Let’s just suppose the criticism is supposed to be that none of the main protagonists – Harry, Hermione, and Ron – are black.
Now “black” seems too specific. Why should one of them be black as opposed to Asian? In any case, Ron is ruled out since it’s an important characteristic of his family to be redheaded.
So in other words I can only conclude, that the criticism is, that either Harry or Hermione should have been non-white? I’m all for it. But I think that’s a rather weak criticism. I.e. it’s more of a criticism against culture in general that most books only have white protagonists, not a criticism against any one book with a white protagonist. Unless we want to say it’s blameworthy for ANY book to not have a non-white protagonist, which is absurd.
Come to think of it, the real “racism” (if that’s the word) inherent in Harry Potter is that the USA doesn’t exist. Like, at all. There are no American students or teachers at Hogwarts, there is no interaction with the American wizard world, there are no American Swampsnout (or whatever) dragons. America simply doesn’t exist and there is no explanation for its non-existence.
At least non-white people exist in Harry Potter (though perhaps they’re underrepresented in the importance department) but there’s an entire continent missing!
DrDMFM:
Thanks. The wiki referred to DNA evidence, and I wasn’t sure whether the reference was contemporary to the book or the writing of the wiki entry… or whether it was even correct. In retrospect, I should’a known we didn’t have Neanderthal DNA in 1980!
It may be too late in the thread, but does anyone have positive recommendations for F/SF authors without race fail?
Obviously Ursula LeGuin & Octavia Butler. Liam Hearn.
I’ll nominate Ben Aaronovitch’s urban fantasy detective Rivers of London, Moon over Soho (apprentice wizard in the London police.)
Others I’m blocking names on, but I have read quite a lot of YA fantasy recently, and some had non-white races as the default. Tamora Pierce maybe?? One odd problem I find with reading ebooks is that my memory associating author & title with book is very much weaker than when I read physical books.
@Althea – Have you read Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell? It takes place in England, during the reign of King George, but it does have a black character who’s DEFINITELY not just plugged in there.
I’d be interested to hear other perspectives on it.
@PZ
Thank you for once again demonstrating your commitment to diversity. It probably doesn’t seem like the biggest deal in the world (one white person demonstrating a basic understanding of one of the functions of white privilege) but as a POC it means a lot to me to see one of our leaders with some sense. I think that just as with sexism within the skeptic community, we clearly have a lot of work to do. Nevertheless, it heartens me that not all of our prominent personalities will piss off all minorities. I like you SO much better than Dawkins ;-)
Somehow, I don’t think having the standout black character being a man who turns into an uncontrollable beast would have gone over very well.
I think the great thing about debates here is you can tell everyone has actually gone and read everything that’s been posted! Arguments which have been refuted haven’t been brought up repeatedly – it’s so refreshing for an internet debate!
That said, there were two points Sally Strange has made which I disagree with, which I’d like to address
I earlier criticised a paper on HP for assuming that whenever Rowling doesn’t mention a character’s race, that character is automatically white, specifically I said “I don’t buy that.”
Sally Strange responded:
Despite my grandiose introduction, I don’t actually have a good argument against this other than saying that this is not my experience. I’m not pretending I don’t see race, but I’ve never felt that when a character’s race has not been mentioned the character defaults to white. I’ve also never personally seen this at work when I’ve been involved (in a wide range of roles) in tv/film/stage productions.
I have a peer group that’s about 60% white, 30% Asian and 10% mixed/other, perhaps having a more mixed group of friends and colleagues means that I’m more likely to naturally imagine a character I’m reading about as Asian without being prompted to do so, than someone who has a peer group that is less mixed. Inherent cultural biases etc. etc. apply in this way, too. Anyway, I’m rambling now and I’m not expressing my argument clearly – maybe I should have left it at “I disagree and that’s not my experience”.
Sally Strange also said:
I don’t agree that Rowling dealing with this issue, or the way she deals with it is appropriation. Furthermore, Rowling makes it very, *very* explicit, especially in the later books. The films do as well, especially the last two.
Forgive me if I’m attacking a straw-man argument here, but I feel as if you’ve interpreted Rowling’s take on this issue as analogous to the civil rights struggle and racial issues in the US (and I’m guessing you’re American by the way you spelt “color”). Obviously the HP series is not set in the US and Rowling isn’t dealing with race struggles and issues as they pertain to the US. I feel that a lot of the series draws from World War 2, especially in that Voldemort’s followers parallel many aspects of Nazism. Certainly more parallels than with opponents of, for example, civil rights.
The book “Mudbloods and How to Spot Them” which Harry finds in Umbridge’s draw in HP7, for example, brings to mind the anthropometric measurements Nazis used to try and distinguish Aryans from Jews.
I don’t think what Rowling actually wrote can be discounted because you don’t think the ratio of explicitly white characters to explicitly black characters is good enough.
Again, I’m not arguing (or writing) well, but there’s a well written and thorough rundown of some of Rowling’ themes, with reference to Rowling’s influences and things she has actually said, on this Wikipedia article. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Harry_Potter . I feel that you’re inferring and finding things that aren’t actually there.
Overall, Rowling has made her point, it’s clear that she rejects any ideas of racial purity. I don’t understand why people are saying “nuh-uh she is too racist!”
Some other things I’d like to respond to:
Abe said:
I totally agree! I can never enjoy dubbed movies, I always feel like my intelligence is being insulted somehow – and more importantly the actor’s performance is being destroyed.
Sketch said:
It’s not completely missing, but it gets the same look in as many other countries, such as Australia. To be honest (and this may come across as Amercia-bashing, but it shouldn’t) it was actually refreshing. People from the US are obviously one of the largest, if not the largest market for film/books. Consider that in Australian and UK films (even historical films) there are often American characters and references (badly) inserted in an attempt to appeal to the US market. The majority is so used to being catered to that they can see the lack of catering as an imbalance.
Thought of something to add–because wizards can teleport around the world by various means they wouldn’t have much incentive to emigrate. They seem to be homebodies who stick to wizarding communities for the most part. The most likely reason to move would be marriage. If there were no race (as opposed to muggle) prejudice you’d expect old wizard families like the Blacks to have an occasional mixed race branch which would quickly get diluted as people would mostly marry someone they met locally. The families that had no objection to marrying muggle-borns would be more reflective of the culture at large.
So it’s actually kind of unclear how someone like Blaise Zabini would end up at Hogwarts anyhow. If he came from an old African family his immediate family must have immigrated recently because no ancestor of his would ever consider marrying an Afro-English muggle. Perhaps one of his parents married an African.
Oh, I forgot. There’s an interesting (and well sourced) essay called The Influence of Nazi Germany on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series here – http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/features/essays/issue27/nazi-germany for anyone who’s interested.
@Alethea H. Claw
I don’t agree that Rowling and Tolkien are race fail, this is besides the point, and I don’t have any suggestions… But did you know that Lian Hearn is actually a pen name of Gillian Rubenstein? It’s a bit of a mindfuck for people like myself who grew up with her childrens’ books!
I think part of it has to do with constantly being told that you can’t possibly understand the perspectives of people who aren’t like you and don’t have your privilege. That’s certainly intimidating to me despite the fact that I identify with slightly androgynous female characters better than any alternative type of protagonist and am making a conscious but hopefully unobtrusive effort to incorporate more ethnic diversity into the storylines I compose – every once in a while I feel like an impostor, but mostly I’m just reluctant to invite being called one. (To a lesser degree I want to avoid making boneheaded mistakes in characterization, but since none of my characters are at all intended to represent their demographic groups in a general sense, I’m less worried about that – just about having it read in).
Maybe this factor is less important for a lot of writers or would-be writers.
windwaker9 responded to me pointing out America’s absence in the Harry Potter universe:
“It’s not completely missing, but it gets the same look in as many other countries, such as Australia. To be honest (and this may come across as Amercia-bashing, but it shouldn’t) it was actually refreshing. People from the US are obviously one of the largest, if not the largest market for film/books. Consider that in Australian and UK films (even historical films) there are often American characters and references (badly) inserted in an attempt to appeal to the US market. The majority is so used to being catered to that they can see the lack of catering as an imbalance.”
Oh, for sure! I wasn’t lamenting the absence of catering to a US market. I’m just puzzled that the existence of the USA isn’t even acknowledged. You say it’s not completely missing, but I’m not aware of it being mentioned even once throughout the books. A complete absence might not be so strange, but you’d expect at least a cursory lampshade – i.e. Hermione going “my bedtime reading was this book about foreign relations between magical communities. We haven’t heard anything from American wizards in decades. Nobody knows why.”
@sketch
There’s a reference in the fourth book as they’re walking through the campsite outside of the world cup stadium. There’s a group of American witches bearing the name of Salem or something.
… That’s pretty much the only mention.
Alethea H. Claw said: “One odd problem I find with reading ebooks is that my memory associating author & title with book is very much weaker than when I read physical books.”
I would venture a guess about the reason being, that when you read a physical book you see the author and title on the cover every time you pick it up and put it down. Depending on how you read your ebooks that wouldn’t be the case.
You know, it really does seem awkward describing people who maintain some unconscious prejudices with the same word we use for cross-burners.
marthur, your memory is superior to mine. Kudos to you.
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Salem_Witches%27_Institute
Notice how you have to keep saying that, though, or people WILL assume you’re calling them a KKK member. It might well not work, but wouldn’t the possibility, that coining and popularizing some additional terminology might allow you to now have to keep saying that, at least be worth exploring?
@Sketch
I see what you’re saying, it was a bit surprising. That said, as an Australian I don’t mind not seeing any references to Australia as I’m used to not being catered to.
American audiences who are used to being catered to in foreign films/tv/literature do get annoyed when they don’t see an American character or American references. It’s something that’s rather unique to US audiences, in my experience. Maybe you’re just not used to it? I think this is something I can see as an outsider that you may not be able to see as an insider :)
On a personal note, I’d rather no references than token references that are just there to tick all the boxes!
@Azkyroth – that’s pretty much what I was trying to get at.
Yeah; once threads hit a certain length I tend to respond to comments that jump out at me as I encounter them rather than reading to the bottom (then refreshing and probably having 30 more comments to read…)
windwaker9, you seem to be assuming that I’m American. I’m a Faroese person living in England. Sorry for not flying my colours more clearly from the start. :)
Eh well, I’m open to suggestions!
@Sketch
Ah! My mistake, sorry! I think my point still stands, though. I’m so used to the shoehorned US character or reference I don’t even notice it a lot of the time, so it was refreshing in the HP series that it wasn’t there.
“Blind spot” seems like a promising base.
@Azkyroth 173:
The intimidation thing is a problem for me too. I want to write from different perspectives, but I’m worried that if I do something wrong, I’ll be attacked for trying to appropriate culture, or for trying to pretend I “get” a perspective that I’m not capable of getting because I’m a white, cis male.
@abe
I think perhaps the best thing to do is write as well rounded a character as you can – not write a character that attempts to speak for an entire group of people’s point of view, or worry about speaking for an entire groups point of view.
In my opinion if the character is a strong, well rounded character who happens to be transgender, and transgender issues are only raised where they would naturally be raised you have succeeded.
If the character is defined by being transgender, and only exists to explore transgender issues, or transgender issues are forced upon the story where they are irrelevant you probably haven’t succeeded.
I don’t think you need to be scared of writing a transgender character, being a cis white male yourself. You should be able to “get” the character’s perspective as much as you can “get” the perspective or any other character. To use some random examples, if you as a cis white, (probably) young male from whatever country you are from can “get” and effectively write about the plight of a fictional 50 year old French woman from the 40s, or the leader of a dying alien race in the far flung future, or a fictionalised version of a historical figure whose experiences and worldviews will be totally different from your own, you should be able to “get” and write effectively about a transgender character.
I don’t agree with the notion that someone is not capable of getting transgender issues just because they themselves are not transgender. It doesn’t make sense to me.
You just need to be sure that you’re writing a transgender character you’re writing in the same way you would write a cis character, with the same effort towards characterisation etc. Most of all, make sure you’re writing without tokenism.
Maybe it’s an American thing, but I didn’t even notice our absence from the Harry Potter story. I just figured we didn’t have much of a role in the European wizarding world the way Indonesia apparently didn’t have much of a role.
I dunno, I find it a little strange to think that Americans would be offended by that, but maybe I’m the strange one…
This whole argument is a very Americentric one. Lets look at the demographics of the UK
92% White
3% Indian or Pakistani
2% Black.
I think JK Rowling did a pretty good job.
@abe
I don’t think I said that Americans would be offended by not being mentioned or catered to, just that they might not be used to it.
Partly I’m just a bit bitter that Australian and UK tv/films/literature often has to keep the US market in mind, even though US films don’t have to keep the Australian/UK market in mind. American audiences may not accept something straight from the Australian/UK market in the same way that an Australian/UK audience will accept something straight from the US market.
This is especially prevalent in comedy, for example. I know a lot of Australian comedians have a tough time in the US. However in Australia we’re so used to the American comedic style that American comics go over as well here as they might in America.
So as I said, Americans may not be so accepting of tv/film/literature that may not cater to them because they’re not used to it. Why else would they keep making US versions of UK shows like Queer as Folk, The Office, Skins, Shameless, Life on Mars and Being Human?
abe said: “Maybe it’s an American thing, but I didn’t even notice our absence from the Harry Potter story. I just figured we didn’t have much of a role in the European wizarding world the way Indonesia apparently didn’t have much of a role.
I dunno, I find it a little strange to think that Americans would be offended by that, but maybe I’m the strange one…”
As a non-American I didn’t find your absence offensive; only puzzling. The reason being that, for good or worse, the USA is a globally influential country with a very strong presence in the rest of the world. Granted, wizards aren’t much for modern media like films, marketed music, computer games, television, and internet. However, living in England myself and encountering Americans (and otherwise indirect American influence in general) at the very least regularly, I would think there would be something more tangible at Hogwarts than a few token Salem witches with a banner. Especially considering that Hogwarts is the only magical school in England so all English-based magical Americans would have to interact with it sooner or later if they had anything to do with magical education whatsoever. You’d expect at a minimum one American teacher.
Mind, I’m not talking about catering to an American audience (as seems to be windwaker9’s interpretation of the topic) I’m merely raising questions about demographical realism. (I know! I know! Nitpicking how plausible the Harry Potter universe is. Pff.)
Anyway, in comparison I hardly come across Australians or Australian culture influence at all, so I’m not as surprised at Asutralia’s absence from the Potterverse.
To Emrysmyrddin (#64 and #68)
The reason for Harry’s behavior in HBP isn’t his upbringing nor his losses (he hardly spends a second thinking of Sirius in that book, in complete contrast with his treatment of Cedric’s death in the previous book). It is the toxic atmosphere of Hogwarts, and particularly the way Harry and his friends repeatedly get away with behavior that is obnoxious, violent, blatantly disobedient, disrespectful, occasionally criminal. For two generations the kids who are ‘the height of cool’ are the school bullies – the Marauders and the Weasley twins. Their Head of House mostly ignores these behaviors of the trio or at most slaps them on the wrist and the headmaster twinkles at them. When Harry attacks Vincent and Argus it has nothing to do with his ‘responsibility’, it is all about enjoying the ability to hurt another for fun. And note that he doesn’t go after someone who might be considered powerful like Draco, but a sidekick who until this moment hardly did anything beyond standing about looking threatening and whom Harry considers slow. The other victim is a squib – who can’t fight back. Harry doesn’t have a temper problem in HBP, he has access to new spells which he is itching to use and whose effect he enjoys seeing.
Yes, Argus cooperated with Dolores the previous year. Attacking him in a way he can’t defend himself from is still wrong, and not funny. In our world, if a paraplegic person does despicable things it is still wrong to force on hir a gag s/he can’t fight or remove (and this happens on a different occasion, so the gagging isn’t even a defensive act). And the same goes to all magical pranks against Argus.
In DH Harry tortures Amycus for spitting at Minerva. That’s not ‘use of Unforgivables in a war situation’ – a torture spell that you have to really mean when casting is not an effective way to dispatch an enemy. Nor was Harry’s interference necessary – Minerva is a powerful witch in her own right, not a crone in distress. And there are no shades of gray regarding torture. Of all acts of torture we see in the series the most forgivable is Draco’s torture of the two DEs because not only was he being threatened with worse torture himself but his parents were also implicitly under threat, as Tom was using their home for headquarters and Lucius had been deprived of his wand. Harry’s torture of Amycus was a wanton act of cruelty which Harry admits to enjoying. As for us knowing Harry is being wrong – just in case we thought that was the case, Minerva calls it ‘gallant’. (headdesk)
Harry and Hermione: Yes, during his row with Ron. It is most glaring in the early part of chapter 19, when he yearns to see a friendly face – while Hermione is with him the whole time. She doesn’t count. DH – for several months Hermione is his only company. He does not treat her nicely during that time. It gets worse after she saves his life (but accidentally breaks his wand) and then heals him – I hate seeing how submissively she treats him.
Harry not knowing the names of his classmates: It is canon that Gryffindors and Slytherins in Harry’s year have Potions and Care of Magical Creatures together from year 1 and 3 respectively. Yet in OOTP Harry can’t come up with the name of that weedy Slytherin boy (Theodore). It is also canon that Gryffindors in Harry’s year have Herbology with the Hufflepuffs at least in years 2 and 4, yet in year 5 Harry doesn’t know Zach’s name. Harry’s class is small, one has to be really oblivious to not learn everyone’s names in so many years.
What Rowling says her book is about and what it actually shows itself to be about are different things. I know that to Rowling the discrimination based on blood purity is the most important thing. But because of the way other forms of discrimination are treated I can’t take her seriously without suffering cognitive dissonance. Worst of all is the treatment of Muggles. Bad enough in the books, but her interviews really make me see red. Think: The Bad Guys are evil for considering Hermione a non-person. But the Good Guys (including eventually Hermione herself) consider her parents non-persons. That’s a poor way to teach acceptance and non-bigotry. That’s like saying a person of mixed-race is OK if s/he can ‘pass’ as white, but hir darker parents aren’t.
No, the series really doesn’t do that. The message of the series is that if you are one of those the author likes you should be allowed to do anything and get away with it, all your crimes can be excused, explained away or actually praised. And if you are one of those she doesn’t like then no matter how hard you try you will barely get grudging acknowledgement.
There is another mention of the US in HP – in Quidditch Through the Ages – apparently US wizards don’t play Quidditch, but have a different broom game of their own. And I think one of the creatures in Fantastic Beasts is from the southern USA.
To Bill Dauphin, #126
As opposed to the equally inbred Weasleys? Or Potters (until James’ marriage to Lily)? Or Longbottoms?
And do you mean ethnic diversity in the magical sense or the kind that exists in our world? Because Blaise is apparently pureblood, definitely Slytherin, and black.
anat, I think most of the issues you mention can be explained by a simple fact about people in the Potterverse: they’re either Intrinsically Good people or Intrinsically Bad people. Sure, you have IG’s doing bad things, but that’s ok because their Intrinsic Goodness is an essential property of their identity, not a property contingent upon anything irrelevant like, say, their actions. This goes the other way around. Some of the IB’s don’t actually do many bad things. They just are Intrinsically Bad, because that’s who they are. It’s also an explanation for lack of motivation for people’s actions in the Potterverse. IG’s don’t need any motivation for doing good things while IB’s don’t need any for doing bad. Give the idea a chance. Compare it to the Potter-narrative. I’m sure all of the characters in Harry Potter make more sense on that assumption than without it. :)
@Anat re. comment 193
Oh dear.
I’m not going to dissect each of your points and argue back like that, but it looks like you’ve read the story intentionally negatively in order to re-frame Harry as a villain. It’s ridiculous, really. You can do that with almost any story if you want to assassinate the character of the protagonist.
Since we’ve been discussing the Lord Of The Rings in this thread, your reading of the HP series reminds me of Cracked’s alternate view of LOTR which reframes Sauron from ultimate mythological evil to a “mace-weilding folk hero”. http://www.cracked.com/article_18417_9-famous-movie-villains-who-were-right-all-along_p3.html . The thing is, they were joking and you are obviously not.
Harry is in no way the nasty villain you’ve made him out to be through selective readings and purposeful misinterpretations of the text (hmmm… that’s a phrase sounds like it fits on this blog). Of course he’s not perfect, but I believe this is of the strongest parts of Rowling’s work – that her main character isn’t a perfect, golden wonderchild like most protagonists in most works of fiction.
windwaker9:
Would you expect atheists to be anything but critical of the overarching ideology of the Harry Potter books? After all, Harry Potter is obviously Jesus. He even loved us so much that he died to save us all and then came back from the dead. (Spoiler alert. Oops, sorry. Too late.)
But dying and coming back to life to save us is so in right now! – http://imgur.com/a/GPGEy
windwaker9, most of those are completely fair points. Neo in particular. I think Jack Sparrow is the least likely candidate. You need to willingly sacrifice yourself on behalf of humanity. Being cuffed to the dinnerplate of a Kraken because you can’t keep it in your trousers doesn’t count.
On a sidenote I think The Doctor is superior to Jesus. Jesus only died and came back once.
Jack Sparrow: Accidental Messiah.
@37.PZ Myers : 14 January 2012 at 10:10 am
Well, okay, that’s not how I percieved the books at all so I guess its just a case of Your Mileage May Vary.
Whitebread?
Well that’s good to know. The OP did kinda come across that way to me, anyhow.
Well if he isn’t then I think he’s wrong on that score because HP *is* pretty ethnically diverse in my view. [shrug.]
@87. Classical Cipher, Murmur Muris, OM says:
Okay, I’ll look at that – thanks.
@Elena #153
Sub titles alienates the audience? You are joking yes? I watch about as many subtitled movies as one’s in English. I won’t watch dubbed if I can avoid it. I want to hear the expression the actual actors put into the voice. Pan’s Labyrinth was fantastic. A dubbed version? Spew! The only time I enjoyed dubbing was in the series Monkey, because it was so camp.
(PS I did the block quote with the cite option but it doesn’t seem to work.)
Which King George? We’ve had six.
OK, I know you mean George III because he’s the only one a lot of Americans will have heard of, but how about being just a little less parochial? There were a considerable number of black people in 18th century England, mostly in London and the major slave-trade ports. Some black Liverpuddlians can trace their black English ancestry back ten generations.
Personally, I try to be colorblind when dealing with people, but I sometimes catch myself thinking or saying otherwise. It is hard to shake the environment you grew up in, and believe me racism was alive and well at that time and place.
Still, I have that background of white privilege, and thus it is easier for me to be colorblind than someone who had been burned by racism. Just like people from abusive families tend to be highly attuned to social nuances, because they were always on the alert for when mommy or daddy might get angry. My wife is much more socially conscious, having come from an abusive home, than I ever can be. Like a fish taking the water for granted, I tend to be oblivious to those nuances until I do something stupid and have to endure some negative conditioning. This is often in the form of internal, berating dialog; if I want stronger conditioning I can always come to Pharyngula and make a few unthinking comments. ;-)
Likewise, I have enjoyed the HP and LotR stories and never once thought about the racial balance or lack thereof. Then again, I could probably read Huckleberry Finn and enjoy it as a story without overly musing about the culture of the time. Perhaps it is a reflection of my white privilege background. Perhaps it is more like Heinlein’s observation, about how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired. More likely, it would just not get past my filter of “This doesn’t affect me.”
I’m working on becoming more aware, but that lack of immediate impact on my life does make the problem seem more remote and less urgent. That is I think one of the main benefits I get from Pharyngula (the other is good arguments against the religiously impaired). I am more constantly prodded to think about these things than I would be left to my own devices.
See my #205
dianne@65,
Though your “old money” point is more sound – there may be some mixed-race old money families, though I can’t think of any offhand. But then I’m not a student of upper-class genealogy – Walton might be able to help! However, being magical, they could surely have acquired money fairly quickly – but then again, why would a person with magical powers be a slave, or working as a servant or seaman? (Which is how 18th century black immigrants to Britain invariably arrived, AFAIK.)
HP was written in Scotland – Edinburgh to be precise, although Rowland is English.
I thoroughly recommend the book – unlike CotCB, the characters are not merely moderns dressed up as cavepeople. Kurtén had an interesting (though now scientifically outdated) idea about the extinction of the Neandertals*: that they, but not the Cro-Magnons, welcomed hybridization, and that hybrids were sterile, although often exceptionally gifted.
*This is the correct spelling; “Neanderthals” is no longer used in scientific contexts.
Sorry.
I didn’t know that. Sorry to offend. I think the point stands, though…
Of course I’ve nothing against them personally, but those damn coyotes are really bringing down the price of dens in the neighbourhood :-p
Although I consider myself to be a “fangirl”, one thing is clear:
When JKR started writing the books, she didn’t think anything through.
The whole series is a great big suspension of disbelief on a bazillion levels.
Think Quidditch: There are 4 teams in the only wizarding school in Britain, but there’s a whole league in the adult world.
Think the size of the wizarding community: It clearly must be huge, given that there are things like a Quidditch league, whole industries, a ministry with hundreds of employees, while at the same time the only school is tiny and everybody knows everybody else and is probably related to them anyway.
Or the fact that there seem to be wizards who marry muggle although they never ever seem to meet anyway.
Given all those major flaws in basic logic, it’s no surprise that JKR didn’t think more subtle problems (at least for privileged people) through.
I think she made a conscious attempt at being diverse, but didn’t waste too much time on it.
On the other hand I actually enjoyed that her protagonists weren’t 100% perfect shiny people (who wants such heroes anyway?)
I loved how the OP Harry was the egocentristic teen, how Hermione was jealous, how Ron struggled with his self-esteem issues throughout the series.
And how even the bad guys had a chance of redemption (the Malfoys, for example, or Kreacher).
But given that books and movies have different strengths, the books did much better on those issues than the movies
@cybercmdr:
*blink* …Is that really so? Like, measurably? Because it would explain a lot… and makes sense, in ways I can’t quite grasp.
Seconded.
—
@Abe:
Y’know, it’s been said before, but if your concern (and your critics’ concern) is for getting the story right, I really think it’ll all work out. As opposed to keeping oneself from being attacked, I mean. Because, if the world and story and most especially the characters are true to themselves, then they should hold up mostly as a side effect; which is pretty much what Azkyroth and windwaker already said, heh.
I figure a narrow perspective’s another form of ignorance, similar to reliance on tired tropes. So we storytellers need to train up to the best of our abilities and become, not just genre-savvy, but privilege-savvy and diversity-savvy.
On the intimidation thing – I do take the “do the best you possibly can, and it’ll probably be ok” approach, I was just acknowledging that the feeling is there.
blockquote><the ancestors of the Neandertalers had been living in high latitudes for hundreds of thousands of years, while the Cro-Magnon folks had fairly recently arrived from Africa – David M.
Actually not, in the latter case, according to the latest genetic evidence. The first AMHs to spread from Africa seem to have taken a coastal route, leaving about 70,000 BP, and one group of their descendants reached Australia before any reached Europe around 40,000 BP. They would still possibly have been significantly darker than the Neandertals in southern Sweden, where Dance of the Tiger is set, depending on how long they took to spread that far.
abe@211,
I wasn’t offended – just scratching an itch! I’m an Englishman living in Scotland, so perhaps more aware of the difference between “English” and “British” than most English, let alone most Americans; but as I noted@205, there were a significant number of black people in the England of George III, enough that many who appear to be and think of themselves as white, particularly in London, Liverpool and Bristol, will have some black English ancestors – something most Brits probably don’t know.
If.
@Azkyroth: definitely, if. Should I elaborate?
@Giliell
I see what you’re saying but can you imagine how boring the books would be if Rowling spent half her time explaining away every single logical inconsistency? She deals with the important and interesting things, not the inner workings of how many amateur, semi-pro and professional Quiddich teams there are in England!
Any supposed “white privilege” found in the books says more about the reader ignoring the wider themes on the rejection of any notion of racial superiority, than it says about Rowling’s work or world view.
anat (@195):
I think I actually anticipated and dealt with your objections in my original comment about the wizard/muggle “racial” axis. It’s not really about What Would Make Sense If This Were Real™; it’s about what works for a storyteller in pursuing her literary goals. The ethnic homogeneity of the Deatheaters is, in my theory, a literary device, and not any sort of attempt at demographic/genetic realism.
Mind you, I’m not at all sure Rowling was doing that consciously: As others have noted, she was essentially an untrained amateur writer when she began the series, and her original conception of the wizarding universe — which she was pretty much stuck with once the first couple books became so popular — is full of not-well-thought-out oddities. It’s a testament to the intrinsic interest of her characters and the narrative that so many readers give her a pass on questions like “where do all the effin’ professional quidditch players come from?”
And with that said, I really don’t want to engage you further on this, because, like windwaker9, I perceive you as bringing an a prior antagonistic reading to the books. Why, I don’t care to guess.
To sketch (#196):
Most definitely. In my neck of fandom (mostly disappointed fans, ex-fans and some who were never fans) it is called IOIAGDI – it’s OK if a Gryffindor does it.
I know that, I was just trying to give context, since the book is not in a “modern style” or a modern era.
I’m still interested to hear other people’s opinions of it, if anyone has read it (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell), in relation to this conversation.
When JKR started writing the books, she didn’t think anything through.
I also consider myself a fangirl and completely agree. One thing that bothers me for no good reason is the claim that wizards live longer than muggles. Yet there is no sign of higher education, everyone marries right out of high school and older people are rare. My theory is that actually wizards have, on average, shorter life expectancies and tend to die in their 50s or early 60s. Some, of course, live longer due to whatever magic they work (i.e. the philosopher’s stone), but most don’t. They think they live longer because they haven’t been paying attention to non-wizard medicine and epidemiology since the middle ages.
Also, what’s with the secrecy? Why is no one interested in integrating magic and technology? A magic/technologic Britain could kick the rest of the world’s butt and be the empire it always dreamed of being again…but no one does it. Even Arthur Weasley, who is interested in all things muggle, is only interested in the novelty, not the power. Hermione, who seems ideally situated to bring the two worlds together, is completely uninterested in doing anything but forgetting about her non-wizarding life. This all seems to me completely illogical. I realize that from the author’s point of view, it is necessary because otherwise the books would be nearly impossible to write, but from within the story it makes no sense.
One reason I’m willing to forgive Tolkien a lot, including a bunch of racism, sexism, elitism, and belief in the divine right of kings, is that he DID think things through. As far as I can tell, the LOTR world is completely consistent. No one suddenly changes back story or personality between books, arcs don’t disappear, people don’t act completely irrationally (except elves who are set up as beings that can’t be understood by mere mortals so that is consistent within the story). I can’t think of any other authors with similar consistency and it makes me very fond of LOTR despite all the problems it has from the modern point of view.
KG:
Yah, me too. I was never really in a position to evaluate the book’s science (IIRC Kurtén was careful, in his preface, not to claim his idea about the extinction as a proper hypothesis, but only as scientifically informed speculation), but I found the book compelling, and I’ve re-read it a couple times (hmmm… wonder where my copy is).
As it turns out, I’ve never read Clan of the Cave Bear or any of its sequels: I’d read several joint reviews of Dance and CotCB, and of the two, I picked Dance.
Thanks. There was some back-and-forth on a recent episode of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast about whether the pendulum had swung back to th, and that was the spelling used in the wiki on Dance; I’m glad to have a more authoritative source!
KG: Sorry about my ignorance of British history and racial immigration patterns! If it helps, I can make at least one statement of fact or supposed fact each about George the 2nd and 4th. George the 2nd appears briefly in American history as being a bit of a jerk that the colonists were hoping would die soon and leave a better successor. (No, I don’t have the slightest idea how good a ruler he was to the colonizing country. Sorry.) George the 4th showed up briefly in medical school as another famous person suspected of having porphyria (along with his father.) George the 6th was…er…an early 20th century king? Someone between Victoria and Elizabeth 2nd anyway. That concludes the sum of my knowledge of British royalty named George other than 3rd.
What.
To windwaker9 and Bill Dauphin, my antagonism to Harry Potter was acquired after much disappointment. I was hoping for a serious dealing with questionable things that were raised as the series progressed and instead everything was swept under the carpet. DH gave me several headdesk moments in the initial reading and left me feeling empty and disappointed. So I went back and reread the earlier books with the end in mind. And it just got worse. And I discussed it online and so on. It is different only in scale from a religious deconversion experience – one finds something seriously objectionable in the Bible, reads more carefully and notices the same kind of thing all over the place and can no longer make excuses for the book and its messages.
(Oh Harry isn’t the villain, he is a victim of Albus’ indoctrination plan. If you doubt that this was what Albus was doing, I point you to that line in HBP when Albus equates ‘love’ with ‘seeking revenge’. HP is to love as, well, Christianity is to love. From an atheist POV. And Albus – well, I hold him responsible for much that is wrong in wizarding Britain. Including being Tom Riddle’s biggest enabler.)
Me (@221):
That’s a priori!
Tpyos’ punishment, no doubt, for pretentiousness!
Bad strategy. See Stephen Colbert’s mocking of “color blindness” for why. Here’s something he says to his black guests: “Oh, are you African American? Really? I’ll just take your word for it, because I’m color blind, so I can’t tell.”
People have color. It affects how they experience the world. It’s better to acknowledge this, on account of it being reality, rather than try to pretend like you don’t notice. I find that it’s a mindset that helps you be more predisposed towards noticing if/when I am doing/saying something that might come off racist. Also, it takes a lot of mental energy to deny reality.
windwaker9
Well, how about not writing them in the first place?
Which is why I’m saying she didn’t think things through, unlike Tolkien. I love the books, I like the movies, but I’m not pretending that they are somewhat literary quality.
You’re taking the whole thing a bit too serious, don’t you think?
Oh, and as somebody who loves the books, those were the things I found annoying.
Lie back and think of England.
You know, we can actually do both, analyze the failings and shortcoming as well as the strengths. That’s what you call literary criticism. You know, you actually can analyze the brilliance of Shakespeare’s writings, his creativity with early modern English, his witty commentary on Elizabethan English politics while at the same point discussing the racism, antisemitism, misogyny and such.
And, (don’t think I was saying that JKR was anywhere near Shakespeare) the same is true for HP: Her racial metaphor is one of white privilege, one where obviously everything is shiny and fine if you’re not a death eater and where questions like: how is Muggle-born representation in government? are never raised.
Which doesn’t surprise me, disappoint me, which doesn’t make me like the books any less, but simply aware of it.
I’ve only skimmed the thread and didn’t want to comment much because if I started going on about HP, I would never stop, but I just have to ask: anat, are you me?
I’m a great fan of HP, or rather what HP had a potential to be, but at the same time I am very disappointed with what it actually became. DH especially was a pain to read. (viva la fanfiction!)
Somebody forgot to tell a bunch of scientists.
When Rowling first started working on the books she made a list of 10 boys and 10 girls in each of four houses in Harry’s year. She never used many of them, but one of these eighty children shows up whenever Rowling needs someone to scream at a Quidditch match or say hi to Harry on the train. She did something similar with the teachers and Harry’s schedule. After she had worked on the books for a while she realized that Hogwarts actually does seem to have 7 * 80 = 560 students and an appropriate amount of teachers and dormitories when in fact she’d envisioned it as much larger, large enough to educate the children of a Great Britain with a Quidditch league and a government department of magic. It’s basically a literary device, kind of like double time in Shakespeare.
Actually Rowling does a surprisingly good job of answering questions like “Where are the old people?” She has explanations for a lot of things. Contrary to the claim that she doesn’t think things through, I think she thinks about everything, but starts with a foregone conclusion which she arrived at for literary reasons. Never heard her address the general lack of mature people though.
I’m actually most disappointed in DH how Slythrin got pushed in front of the bus. They seemed to be hinting some that Slythrin=/= evil just that many evil wizards came from that those because it promoted guile and cunning. But every Slythrin we see save for teachers seems to indicate that Slythrin==jackass. But in the final battle we explitly have the author say that those of Slythrin can’t be trusted. Yet Snape is a hero for using exactly what the Slythrin values are?
Confused moral.
Fair enough. Save that, why, if there is no logical purpose to doing so, is it not tokenism to “intentionally” add elements to a work that you didn’t need, just to salve someone’s opinion of why those elements are not there? And, how many are likely to really take the time to treat those elements are important, or fairly, instead of just picking some stereotype to shove into the gap? Also, when/if someone does decide to adapt it to Hollywood/TV, what stops them from making this stereotyping worse, or just rewriting things to remove it, along with the diversity, to make it “fit” some imaginary target audience? You can’t force that sort of change. It happens as a result of people writing about what they know, and knowing the sort of people they put in the stories. Anything else, unless you are already well known, or really interested in some culture, etc., isn’t going to be “researched”, as one person suggests in the thread, to avoid simply standing up a cardboard cut out, which has the right color skin. And, that, by definition, is tokenism. The adding on of a thing, to provide *some* level of representation, when its otherwise not needed, or adds any real value.
Unless, not having people whine about, “not having enough X”, in the story is a ‘value’, greater than telling the thing in the first place? Its just possible that its not the thing being most valued by the person writing it.
There is a logical purpose. People in west default to standard progatonist==White male hetero.
You don’t create a character typically with that in mind. You start out with a sort of concept on the personality or whatever. By randomizing the default and then changing based on what fits the story you adjust for a culturally induced prejudice.
Obviously if you want to write a story about racial issues or similar you have to lock one of the axis, but I still think it might help to randomize others.
You’re asking people to keep to their own demographic basically for writing, which is lazy. For some stories it isn’t too important what race/sex blah blah blah is, save for fluff or for the author to know for the story bible. Randomizing it not only avoids the white/hetero/default but challenges the author and helps avoid falling into the same stock characters again and again.
KG in post #208 said: “but then again, why would a person with magical powers be a slave, or working as a servant or seaman? (Which is how 18th century black immigrants to Britain invariably arrived, AFAIK.)”
How about I kill you unless you make me an Unbreakable Promise to serve me for the rest of your life and then we’ll go hang out with the house-elves?
By the way, I can sort of understand why Harry Potter isn’t a non-white person, since that’s what JKR isn’t. What I don’t understand at all is why HP isn’t a girl.
Poof, you’re a pile of shit. Kill me now, asshole.
Might help that there’s an actual “enslavement” curse that overrides someone’s will?
@David Marjonović
The mechanics and foundations of the films were not crap to begin with, and they rose above mediocrity with the performances of several veteran actors. Furthermore, I don’t see how you can disassociate the performance of the actors from how well a finished movie turns out. If you were talking about script or plot or the components that do not rest on who is playing what role, then you might have a point. But you weren’t–you were talking about the entire finished product which does depend a great deal on how well acted it was.
It’s not such a big deal to do a walkthrough of your work and “intentionally” (ooh scary quotes) fix places where you were careless or screwed up. As for “add elements to a work that you didn’t need”, characters being white or male are elements, too. If they don’t have a good reason for being the default, they don’t have a good reason not to be something else, either.
Again, shallow flat characters are lazy, whether they fit a stereotype or not, and whether they’re white/male or not. Dice and not making stupid jokes pretty much covers it for a background character with just a couple of lines.
Making a huge fucking issue of calling them on it whenever they do so. See Racebending, Akira, whatever happens with Red Tails, this OP, et cetera. It’s not like the internet doesn’t notice this crap.
quoting Dan Savage:
‘Tis Himself, OM. (#240)
If you’d truly rather die than be someone’s slave, I admire your courage and principles. (I think I myself would most likely be a coward and make the Unbreakable Promise.) However, that hardly supports magical people being somehow harder to enslave than muggles, does it? Presumably death is also an option for real-world slaves, yet history says they existed – and still do to this day.
So returning to KG’s question of why a magical person would be a slave. Couldn’t we just as sensibly ask why a muggle would be a slave?
And my point was that the answer is “at pain of death, of course.”
@anat
I’m just wondering (and this isn’t a personal attack), but do you find yourself reading lots of works with these sorts of negative interpretations? Don’t you ever take things at face value? Or anything close to face value?
I think you’re reading into the books a lot of things that aren’t necessarily there – such as when you said “But the Good Guys (including eventually Hermione herself) consider her parents non-persons”, your interpretation of the Weasley twins as school bullies rather than class clowns, or what you’ve implied from Harry being bad at remembering names.
Again, this isn’t a personal attack, but it just sounds like you were in a really, really bad mood when you read the books, and have therefore interpreted things as negatively as possible.
@giliel
You said:
And I’m the one “taking things too seriously” for pointing out that Rowling spends her time dealing with the important and interesting stuff, not explaining the inner workings of the Quiddich league!?
I’ve often noticed that die-hard fans are often the biggest critics of any piece of art – however I find the type of criticism these types of fans make a bit strange. Usually it’s criticism that comes from obsessing too much over (usually) inconsequential details. Star Trek fans are the best/worst example of this – they get really worked up when any detail in an episode of Enterprise made in 2004 conflicts with an Original Series episode from 1967, or any one of 178 episodes of The Next Generation, 176 episodes of Deep Space Nine or 172 episodes of Voyager. I don’t think any fictional world is entirely logically consistent, not Rowlings or Tolkien’s. I don’t think that pointing out the occasional logical inconsistancy is particularly valid criticism. Besides, the story, character and themes are far more interesting. That’s what criticism and/or praise should be focussed on, not whether there are enough pupils at Hogwarts!
Basically what I’m trying to say is that this is art, not science we’re talking about.
As for Rowling’s “white privelage”, I don’t see it. Sorry, but I just don’t. There’s a certain school of criticism that delights in finding racism or discrimination or pretty much anything in everything, but it’s a futile and pointless exercise, really.
Ugh.
Look, I just want to enjoy HP without having to analyze every chapter and paragraph for covert racism that, really, just isn’t there unless you insert it yourself.
The ethnic make-up of the characters properly reflects the ethnic make-up of the UK, and I don’t think we have a right to criticize a writer for writing what she knows. It’s like criticizing Harper Lee for writing a book in which the “negro” is “inferior”, or criticizing Mark Twain for using the word “nigger” in “Tom Sawyer”.
I read to escape, I read to get away from reality, to get out of my own head. I don’t need my refuge ruined by people over-analysing literature.
TL;DR == Don’t care, just wanna read a good book.
@abe, if you’re still reading, this is for you:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2012/01/16/natalie-reed-answers-common-confusions-about-trans-women
No I am not. What I am saying is that it doesn’t help your case to, and there are many examples of this, tack on some black character, because the rest of the people in the story are too white. If you want to make it more diverse, do so in a way that makes sense, not just because you think they are needed. Its not lazy to set a story in a town where the population is **known** to be mostly one color. It is lazy to glue in someone else, to make it more diverse, just to avoid offending people that can’t grasp why it was that way.
Its also detrimental if you don’t spend any real time on the character, and all you do end up with is a cardboard cut out, which shows up, says a few, badly written, lines, and isn’t much seen. Or even one that is seen more, but is nothing *but* badly written lines. This isn’t solving the problem being suggested, its making the author look like a complete moron for doing it.
Actually, I will go one step beyond that and say, where the problem doesn’t exist, its hardly likely that mention of someone’s color, rather than just there name, and how you interact with them, will even be mentioned. That you need to “specify” that X person was black, or Asian, or something, is, in itself, a problem. Insisting on stating such from moment one of the introduction, instead of treating them as people, and only mentioning those detail when/if they are needed, doesn’t help things. I might not, for example, like the fact that they writers of one series I read *eventually* mentioned that a major character I liked had a mustache (it was imho, just way too over the top, given the character), but I can easily imagine the same reaction to, 3-4 books into a series, suddenly discovering that your favorite character, which seemed so “normal” was actually black, for some moron that held some level of prejudice over it. And, that confrontation with their own bias is *far* more likely to result in a rethink of their view, than having someone drop a cast of characters in their lap, on page one, and run down a list of which ones had what color skin, or where which ever cultural group, or religion, or what ever else might need to be “diversified”.
Bit harder to pull that off with video, but…
Drive-by posting ‘cos I’m laaaate:
anat: I agree that Dumbledore was the master manipulator; I’m a Slytherin sympathiser and Snape’s always been my favourite character – I’m a sucker for an anti-hero. But that interpretation doesn’t change my interpretation of Harry’s behaviour in the books; we can see what shapes him, what he’s thinking, being the POV protagonist and all – and I would say he’s a nuanced character who has been used since the night of his parents’ death. Given the context of the story and the incidents you mention, I still can’t agree that Harry was a bully, and he might have been a war criminal if there was any such thing as a wizard Geneva Convention. Given the chaotic state of wizard society and their stance on civil rights and non-human species, I would firmly think not.
Whoever commented on Harry being a boy (sorry no tiiiiime): JKR said that her first thought of the series was when she ‘saw’ Harry sitting on the Hogwarts Express in her mind’s eye. Sometimes characters pop into existence :)
Bye for real this time – argh!
@Kagehi
You’re clearly not arguing with anything I say so I’m not going to argue with you.
You’re very invested in the idea that everything is ok and status quo is good though.
I only read the first 100 or so comments, but I noticed this quote
This is true, and there’s evidence for it. I don’t recall which book it’s in, but near the beginning during the sorting ceremony, Rowling spontaneously mentions a black student being called to the sorting hat. Who is this black student? A black student. No name and no description beyond “black,” and he serves absolutely no purpose. I only recall this passage because when I read it, it was obvious to me how pointless and forced it was.
@ Pteryxx I guess you missed me mentioning my avid reading of Natalie’s stuff, but it remains good advice ;)
@ariamezzo
I see what you’re saying, but I think that’s a pretty big conclusion you’ve drawn from one sentence there.
Rowling may be noting that that student is black not out of any token notion, but it could be (for example) to reiterate that the series is happening in modern, multicultural UK or just because that’s how she imagined it.