Why did the founders retain Slytherin's house?

[delwynmarch]

No: HPFGUIDX 117869


Kneasy wrote :
" Centuars *refused* being status and insisted as being classified as
beasts. 

And apart  from isolated individuals like Firenze, they want nothing
to do with humans, wizard or Muggle. Somewhat anti-social don't you
think?"

Del replies :
Oh, absolutely ! But should that influence the way wizards see them ?

If I remember well, they refused the being status because they didn't
want to be associated with some other species that had been granted
the being status. Am I right ? If I am, then they were being quite
racist. That doesn't mean that other people should follow their lead.

Moreover, the beast and being status seem to me to be quite muddy to
start with. What was the point of it ? What was it needed for ?
Instead of arbitrarily grouping species into two camps according to
rules that don't always make sense, why not deal with those species
individually, on the basis of their own specificities ?

The way I see it, classifying the different species into beasts and
beings was just a way to officially determine who were the leaders and
who were the followers, in the eyes of the *wizards*, who were the
ones who wanted to rule the others to start with. In this case, it
makes sense that both the Centaurs and the Merpeople backed out of the
being status, since they apparently have no desire to rule other species.

The wizards have a problem : they are intelligent and magical, but
they are not the only ones. Muggles don't have that problem : they are
the only ones with that level of intelligence and that degree of
sentience in their world. But wizards are confronted to species that
are their equal in everything except one thing : the desire to rule
the world. So they try to find ways to justify their taking over the
world without making it sound like they are overstepping their limits.
A bit like Westerners a few centuries ago were trying to take over the
world without having it look like they were only would-be tyrants. So
they pretended (and often believed) that it was for the good of other
people, that they were bringing them civilisation and enlightenment,
that those people were savage and self-destructive anyway, and so on.
Except that we are discovering now that those cultures that were
nearly or completely annihilated actually had a lot of good in them,
even if they were vastly different from the Western culture.

Most wizards are very satisfied with the actual WW, governed by
wizards only, and served by other species (House-Elves, Goblins). They
don't care about respecting those other cultures, they just take them
for inherently inferior. They are indeed profoundly racist, and this
is bound to spill over in their relationships with each other too. The
anti-Muggleborn racism and pure-blood ideology are just a way of
trying to determine who should rule and who should serve among the
wizards. Wizards rule the other species, but who should rule among the
wizards ?

Del