[HPforGrownups] Re: Muggle-borns

[Taryn Kimel]

No: HPFGUIDX 49243

Snapesangel:

This question may have come up before, but I have not read it in any 
recent posts. This post is a bit technical but bear with me:)!

I was wondering about what constitutes a muggle born and a half 
blood. 
I know that JK tends to use it to mean that you are a child of a)2 
muggles or b)one muggle and one wizard, but I was thinking about 
Lily and Hermione and Harry , in terms of their "racial purity".

It would seem that Haryy can be a pure blood, even though his mother 
was muggle born and racially the same as Hermione, who gets abuse 
for being a mudblood. Harry  therefore has, if one goes back to his 
grandparents generation, 50% wizard blood (from James's parents) and 
50% muggle blood. He is a 1st generation pureblood but a second 
generation half blood.

I wondered if Lucius and his death eater cronies had particular 
philosophies or policies about this sort of thing, like the Nazi's 
did with their rule that 1/8 jewish blood made 
someone "untermenschen". I know this is unanswerable in canon, but I 
just wondered if anyone had any personal theories? Perhaps it would 
be the case that, as wiht the Nazis, the decision is mainly to do 
with 
a)the physical impossibility of culling half the population and 
still having a functioning society with eg. a big enough work force 
and 
b)the fact that if you only had 1 jewish grandparent and nothing 
else, you would probably not have enough jewish infulence on you to 
make you act "wrong" or look "wrong" for their ideals.
 
Does it just depend on whether they *know* about a person's history 
and is n't very scientific at all. Just picking off anyone who wears 
muggle trainers. 

Me:

I would say that the definition of Lucius and the Death Eaters would be similar to that of the Nazi's. After all, in CoS, Tom refers to Harry as a half-blood (when quoting the similarities between them) even though his mother was a witch. It seemed that his mother being muggle-born was enough for Voldemort to think of Harry as "contaminated," as it were--again, similar to the definition of a Jew during the Holocaust. However, I don't know how far back this would go, whether having one muggle-born grandparent would make you a half-blood, or a great-grandparent. But, at least to Voldemort (and his opinion on this is probably shared by the DE's), having one muggle-born parent marks you as a half-blood, even if you are, by literal definition, a pure-blood.

--Taryn, with her first post

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