Why did the founders retain Slytherin's house?

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 117825


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:

<snip>

> Anyway, as I said on another thread, all the houses are racist. 
> It's just that the Slytherins carry the definition of halfbreed a 
> little further. 

Hufflepuff too, the Founder who said "I'll take the lot and teach all 
of them"?  It seems that, if anyone, she comes off the best from the 
Sorting Hat's Song in OotP.

I think it's still a distinction worth making between the kinds of 
discrimination that Slytherin House embodies, the quality-based 
conceptions of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, and Helga's more open 
policy.  Let's not collapse it into 'little further', because it's a 
rather meaningful little further.

I don't agree with the contention that not having full incorporation 
of non-human students in Hogwarts is racist.  For example, with house-
elves, JKR describes them as having a 'different' kind of magic than 
wizards--they can do some things that wizards absolutely cannot do, 
although there is a good deal of magic that they cannot do.  The 
situation with Winky in GoF seems ambiguous to me to what degree a 
house-elf is functionally capable of using a wand.  Some mutation of 
this is potentially applicable to merpeople, centaurs, etc...who is 
to say that they would be best served by a Hogwarts education, with 
the humans?

This is not to say that wizarding society doesn't treat magical non-
humans badly, because they do.  But the discrimination against them 
is not the same as the discrimination against the magical human of 
Muggle parentage.  Too many initial and situational conditions are 
too different.  (They are, however, perhaps both symptoms of the same 
spiritual malaise, the same thing which is at the root of the Dark 
Arts; the conviction that one is essentially (naturally, 
ontologically) superior, and thus entitled to what one wants.)

Isn't this what Hermione is doing with SPEW, in a sense?  There *is* 
a wrong being done to house-elves in wizarding society at large, and 
they are being treated poorly, but Hermione is going about it with 
little care or regard for what house-elves really are, and what they 
might want for themselves.

My two cents.

-Nora gets back to things like the story of Renaud et Armide