Compassionate hero (WAS Re: Appeal of the story to the reader)

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 175960

> > Betsy Hp:
> > 
> > But two things stood out to me here:  First of all, Slytherin 
exists 
> > because they're allowed to exist.  Their house founder left the 
> > school and the house was kept around.  Why?  As was pointed out 
in 
> > another thread, Germany no longer has a Nazi party.  So why did 
> > Hogwarts keep their racist house?  Why do they encourage small 
> > children to embrace an ideology the school does not support?

Nora: 
> Because it's a cancer deeply rooted in wizarding society?  Because
> there's always been a portion of people who agree with those
> principles, and help keep the house's ideology oriented towards 
that
> principle laid down instead of reorienting it towards different 
values?

Magpie:
If it's a cancer, it seems like a comfortably contained cancer. It 
seems like the Muggle-born issue is there so that we readers can 
recognize it as being racism and see the bad guys as bad because we 
are racists. It's not dealing with racism as something inherent in 
Wizarding Society except as something that the good guys naturally 
oppose, it seems to me. Harry and his friends are identified as 
people who are not racists, which marks them as good, but you're 
right, racism itself is just there as a given with no reasoning that 
our heroes would understand. It's something those other people do, 
and the heroes therefore fight against them. 

This is why, I admit, I thought we were going to have to see racists 
who actually changed in a signficant (if not too extreme) way. I 
thought it would be Draco since he was put through the wringer in 
HBP, Dumbledore told him not to say Mudblood, he was in Harry's 
generation and he was the kid who lived that ideology since he first 
appeared. The closest we got was Slughorn's weak "Some Muggle-borns 
really surprise you--I really loved Lily" and Snape's "Don't use the 
word Mudblood--I really loved Lily too (in fact using that word lost 
her for me)" without getting into what they'd believed before and 
how they came to see differently. We know they loved Lily and 
presumably have to fill the rest in ourselves. (Which is tricky, 
because filling it in ourselves often, imo, leads to trying to make 
racism more logical than it is, and is why people are still confused 
about how Snape could be racist against Muggle-borns when he's a 
Half-blood with a mother parent.) JKR didn't choose to focus on a 
character seeing the error of his/her ways in that regard.

To me this winds up being just sort of ironic, because if nobody 
looks at racism as a natural part of *people* rather than an 
incurable disease that just appears and can't be treated except by 
cutting it off when it gets too malignant, it feels like exactly 
what Betsy said--something there to make the good guys look good. I 
mean, to me it seems like Wizarding society is absolutely bigoted 
all over the place--good guys included--but it doesn't seem like 
bigotry on the part of good guys is presented as a bad thing or 
something we should really worry about. They seem to usually just be 
seeing things the way they are, or having the best of intentions. (I 
agree with Adam, for instance, that Harry doesn't unfairly judge 
Slytherins; his views on them are appropriate.) So even though 
racism is central to the fight against evil, I don't really learn 
anything about racism from the story that I didn't already know. 
Less, in fact, because in Harry's world just identifying the Nazi is 
pretty much enough.

Nora:
> Canon showed us that with Voldemort in the Ministry, some people 
were
> scared/somewhat offended but they went along with things like
> Muggleborn registration.  We have the canonical attitude of most
> members of the House of Black, and the Malfoys.  And so long as 
those
> remain societally acceptable because enough people with enough 
power
> hold them, there remains a place where those who have been 
inculcated
> in those ideas can go and be with the like-minded. 

Magpie:
That's interesting because that's not really what I got reading the 
book. I mean, I see it now that you say it, but to me it seems like 
racism (in the extreme form of the DEs) is presented as socially 
unacceptable quite often. It's only acceptable in the subculture of 
Slytherin. The good guys have social power in the books, and they 
find it vulgar. They are not racists themselves (many readers find 
them bigoted, but it seems like the text says they aren't). 

Society does go along with the Ministry in going after Muggle-borns, 
but that's not explained in a way that says much about it. It seemed 
to me like a plot-point--everyone has to go along with it (even 
thought they've supposedly all been on the lookout for Voldemort and 
his DEs for a year) so that Harry can be living in a dystopia that 
only he and his band of friends can free anyone from. How society as 
a whole is falling to the DEs is just presented as a given, so I 
can't really draw conclusions for how this sort of thing happens. 
None of the characters we know as good guys go along with it. 
Hogwarts puts up a far greater resistance than the WW as a whole, it 
seems. And Hogwarts is what we see.


-m