Chelsea Chong Podcast Script Assignment Mudbloods and Moneybags If youve never heard of the Harry Potter franchise,

then youve probably been living under a rock. That, or youve had your memory wiped by hostile forces using an Obliviate spell, in which case you might want to double-check the rest of your memories too. Famed author J.K. Rowling started the story of Harry Potter in a caf years ago, scribbling a few ideas onto a napkin. But who would have known that those tiny scribbles would amount to seven incredible books, eight box office-breaking movies, a theme park, and a fandom of unashamed Potterheads who wear their Gryffindor scarves proudly as they play real -life versions of Quidditch, the game of flying broomsticks? Nevertheless, the Harry Potter series is not all fun and games. Do not make the mistake of lumping the entire story into the childrens section. At first glance, it may seem to be a cute fairy tale, what with its young characters and magic-infused plot; however, Rowling actually presents some very heavy ills of society in the universe of Harry Potter that reflect those of our own. Indeed, perhaps the reason why so many Potter fans can connect and relate to the series is that Harrys world, for all its dazzling creatures and marvelous spells, contains the same complex problems that are so unfortunately present in real life - namely those of race and class. Now, be warned! Spoilers lie ahead. To start, we go straight to the biggest baddie of the series. Tom Riddle, better known as Voldemort, has a blatant hatred for all non-magical people, or Muggles. This disgust arose as a result of his own pride in being a wizard, and the fact that his Muggle father abandoned the family before Voldemort was born, leaving his mother to die in

childbirth and Voldemort himself to grow up in a miserable orphanage. As time passes, we see that Voldemort extends this enmity toward anything but pure, human, wizard bloodlines, and gains a group of followers called Death Eaters who possess the same mindset. In short, we have a group led by a hypocritical leader whose veins hold the same blood that he wants to eradicate, slowly but surely rising to power and constructing a twisted regime. Sounds similar to some things weve heard before in history, doesnt it? The plotline of Harry Potter practically revolves around this conflict between the elitists who place bloodlines above all else, and the heroes who know better. As the story progresses through each separate book, it becomes a clear, bold commentary on racism. In fact, in author Giselle Liza Anatols book Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, she states that the battle between multiculturalism and racism provides the framework for the series; it is the modern liberal version of the fairy-tale battle between good and evil. Once we take a step back, Harry Potter suddenly seems like much less of a wishywashy kids book. The opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows provides a great, albeit very dark, sample of the racism Rowlings villains believe in. In this particular scene, Voldemort openly mocks one of his own subordinates, Bellatrix Lestrange, for having a niece who not only has mixed parentage, but also recently married a werewolf (an equivalent of interracial marriage in the wizard world). Bellatrix cries She is no niece of ours, my lord! We () have never set eyes on our sister since she married the Mudblood. The advice he then gives her? In your family, so in the worldwe shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of the true blood remain. Of course, cut away is just a nicer phrase that means cold murder, and like the infamous dictators of real life, Voldemort does not hesitate to resort to drastic measures that can create his perfect world. Suman Gupta, author of Re-Reading Harry Potter, seems to sum up

the idea of this scene and for that matter, the entire Death Eater ideology - when he says Just as racism in our world is associated with arbitrary and irrational violence and brutality, so too in the magic world the cruelty and violence of the Dark Side is indelibly associated with bloodprejudice. As if to reiterate his point, the chapter closes with Voldemort killing a woman who actively believed in magical and non-magical harmony and gruesomely feeding her corpse to his pet snake. Lovely. Incidentally, the parallelism between Harry Potter and history is especially emphasized in the film adaptations of the novels. The scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One in which Harry, Ron and Hermione infiltrate the Ministry of Magic is the best example of how the filmmakers brought this link to life. As the camera follows a disguised Harry, the audience experiences every bit of political propaganda that Voldemort has been using. From the grotesque statue of crushed Muggles bearing the so-called justification that Magic is Might, to the monotonous and intimidating march of the government officials at work, to the pamphlets designed in a retro style reminiscent of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler everything works together in an effort to make us feel an echo of horrors we have been familiar with for years. When we read the books, we are free to imagine everything for ourselves, using the written words as guidelines. Meanwhile, in the movies, our perception of the story becomes precisely whatever the producers wanted us to see, and in this case they wanted us to associate the magical government with the corrupted regimes of years gone by. Returning to the novels themselves, lets go backwards a bit to a critical word that Bellatrix previously mentioned: Mudblood. This word first appeared in the second book of the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in which the ideas of prejudice and discrimination made their grand entrance into the novels. Draco Malfoy, the bully of the story

and Harrys rival, calls Hermione Granger a Mudblood which is, as Ron Weasley explains, a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born you know, non-magic parents. Actually, Rowling addresses the issue of race as soon as she introduces it. Ron immediately goes on to say I mean, the rest of us know it doesnt make any difference at all. Look at Neville Longbottom hes pure-blood and he can hardly stand a cauldron the right way up. She quickly dismisses the prejudice, as the implication here is that everyone else already knows that race makes no difference and the Malfoys are simply one sinister family. Furthermore, we see that Rowling keeps her readers from making broad generalizations and turning her story into a tale of purebloods versus Muggle-Borns. The Neville Longbottom whom Ron mentions is the kindhearted and hopelessly clumsy member of the cast. The Weasleys are a pureblood family yet they are constantly the first to defend others against racism. Indeed, fans will probably remember that Arthur Weasley, Rons father, is so fascinated by Muggles that he hides nonmagical items like cars and batteries in his tool shed just to tinker with them and think about how wonderful they are. Rowling teaches her readers to think from an objective point of view and understand right away that lineage does not determine quality in the slightest. Speaking of the infamous Malfoys, Rowling uses this particular family frequently as examples of injustice incarnate. The Malfoys make good villains precisely because they are depicted so realistically. The evils that they commit are so much more relevant (and repulsive) than the clichd quest to take over the world that we see in other stories. William P. MacNeil gives us quite the accurate description when he calls the Malfoys unrepentant gentry recusants of the Dark Arts and the Saint Evrmondes of the magic kingdom in his work titled Harry Potter and the Scales of Justice. Like the Marquis Saint Evrmonde of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities, the Malfoys are noble, cold, and generally distrusted. The teenage Draco Malfoy

is bad enough but from Chamber of Secrets onward, we also see his father, Lucius Malfoy, who combines his bigotry with wealth and political power to form the ultimate depiction of corruption. Giselle Liza Anatol notes that Rowling uses Draco and Lucius to present both race and class as arenas for conflict and resolution. As soon as Lucius Malfoy makes his first appearances, he validates Anatols statement with a flurry of insults. First, he openly mocks the Weasleys poor financial situation with the gibe Dear me, whats the use of being a disgrace to the name of wizard if they dont even pay you well for it? and immediately proceeds to make condescending remarks about Hermiones Muggle parents who happen to be present. Throughout the novels, Lucius uses his high position to exercise political influence on the school governors and even the Minister of Magic himself. Meanwhile, Arthur Weasley, also a government official, is often worked to the bone and later struggles to maintain his job. As Rowling juxtaposes Lucius and Arthur as character foils, she undeniably brings together the eternal clash of the arrogant aristocracy and the pure-hearted poor. Interestingly, we see a combination of both Malfoys racism and elitism in Dobby, the house-elf who worked for the Malfoys until the end of Chamber of Secrets. The house-elves enjoy and find purpose in serving wizards but the way Lucius treats Dobby is reminiscent of the way a white supremacist would have treated a black slave. Notably, he threatens Dobby enough to the point where the poor elf automatically injures himself for every little mistake because he has been conditioned to expect pain and humiliation from his master. The elves are obviously a different race and, thanks to their subservient disposition, they become like a low working class compared to wizards more than enough reason for discrimination in the minds of the wealthy Malfoys. Rowling uses the gap between humans and elves as a device quite often in the novels to really illustrate her suggestions for overcoming racism. Jackie C. Horne points out many

different take-away messages for readers concerning the tyranny of the Malfoys over house-elves in her work Harry and the Other: Answering the Race Question in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter. For instance, some believe that Rowlings specific goal was to help young people understand the cruelty of slavery. On the other hand, some feel that she meant to focus more on the idea of what Horne calls increasing awareness of the culture's recurring prejudices based on supposedly 'natural' differences, by showing how nonsensical it would be for Lucius to abuse Dobby with the justification that house-elves are subservient by nature. It is undeniable that Rowling places a multicultural emphasis on universal emotional identification in order to bridge the gap between all ethnicities and social statuses. In the end, it is clear that J.K. Rowling wanted to communicate more than the average childrens book to the world when she began crafting the story all those years ago. She didnt coin the word Mudblood as a mere plot device. She didnt load all of those loathsome traits into the Malfoys just for the sake of creating more antagonists. Instead, Rowling deliberately designed elements of her own fictional universe to make her readers identify some very real offenses as despicable and unacceptable. She confronted the serious issues like racism and social class that have always plagued the world while driving home a message of peace and unity, showing that a persons character outweighs any other qualities. Perhaps Rowling summed up her own intent best when she wrote as the wise, old headmaster Albus Dumbledore: Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

Works Cited Anatol, Giselle L. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. N.p.: Greenwood Group, 2003. 92. Google Books. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en>. Gupta, Suman. Blood. Re-Reading Harry Potter. 1st ed. N.p.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 104-05. Amazon.com. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. < http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1403912645/ref=sr_1_1?p=S009&keywords=rereading+harry+potter&ie=UTF8&qid=1350537654>. Horne, Jackie C. Project MUSE Harry and the Other: Answering the Race Question in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter. The Lion and the Unicorn 34.1 (2010): n. pag. Project MUSE Harry and the Other: Answering the Race Question in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter.Web. 17 Oct. 2012. < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v034/34.1.horne.html>. MacNeil, William P. "Kidlit as Law-And-Lit: Harry Potter and the Scales of Justice." Law and Literature 14.3 (2002): 552-53. Griffith University. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/6871/21489.pdf?sequence=1>. Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPr. "At Flourish and Blotts, Mudbloods and Murmurs."Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Arthur A. Levine, 1999. N. pag. Print. Rowling, J. K. "The Dark Lord Ascending." Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury Children's, 2007. N. pag. Print. Rowling, J. K. "The Beginning." Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury Children's, 2000. N. pag. Print.