Purebloods, Half-bloods, and Muggle-borns

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186493

Carol earlier:
> Just one minor point: Lily is not a Muggle but a Muggle-born, and even at age nine or ten Severus distinguishes between the two, holding the Muggle Petunia in contempt because she can't perform magic and won't be allowed to attend Hogwarts but liking, admiring, and even loving Lily, who is clearly a gifted little witch with whom he is proud and happy to share his superior knowledge of the WW. <snip>
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sartoris22 responded:
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> Thank you for the clarification. It makes me reconsider the whole Muggle thing, which is really somewhat confusing. Voldemort hates Muggles but is half Muggle. In DH, he wants to round up all the Muggle born wixards and witches, but are those people really Muggles? If, as you say, Lily is not a Muggle because she has magical powers, then what does it really matter if a magical person has one or two non-magical parents? Why is Harry not a Mudblood but Hermione is? Apparently, Voldemort is okay with half bloods, but that doesn't really make sense to me. If a Mudblood has dirty blood, then why isn't a half blood equally reviled? Sirius says that his parents had "pureblood mania." Shouldn't anyone with Muggle blood be considered undesireable? And why would the Deatheaters follow a half blood like Voldemort? Even if Voldemort killed all the so called Mudbloods, as long as he allowed half bloods to live and breed, the wizard blood would continue to be tainted. For example, Ginny is a pureblood who marries and has children with Harry, who is a half blood. Would his kids blood be tainted, or because Harry is magical, would his kids be considered pure bloods?

Carol again:
It's been awhile since this topic, but you should be able to do a search (if the search engine is cooperating!) and find quite a number of helpful old posts.

I agree with you that it's odd that the pure-blood supremacist followers of Voldemort should willingly follow a Half-blood, and I thought that it was even odder for him to hold a meeting in the graveyard where his Muggle father was buried. (Maybe that's not as big a giveaway as I once thought considering that both Muggles and Wizards are buried at Godric's Hollow.) At any rate, at least one Death Eater, Bellatrix Lestrange (who wasn't at the graveyard), is unaware of Voldemort's origins and considers it blasphemy when Harry calls Voldemort a Half-Blood in OoP. Bellatrix also seems to consider herself better than Snape, commenting with sneering arrogance that she and Narcissa (both Pure-bloods) are probably the first of their kind to enter the "Muggle dungheap" where Snape lives. (Obviously, she can't mean the first witch or wizard since Snape lives there.)

There seems to be some degree of prejudice against Half-Bloods, then, especially in Slytherin, but it's nothing like the virulent prejudice of some Slytherins against Muggle-borns, Witches and Wizards who have no magical blood at all because both their parents are Muggles (defined repeatedly in the books as "nonmagical people"). As Ron points out, many of the Death Eaters are Half-Bloods because there simply aren't enough Pure-Bloods left.

It seems to me that the half-blood concept (which is an actual legal concept relating to people who are related to another person through only one rather than two common ancestors, the simplest example being a half-brother or sister. Hagrid's half-brother, Grawp, is still, in Hagrid's mind, his brother because they share a mother. (He says something about blood being important in that sense, just as he speaks of the Malfoys as coming from "bad blood.") Evidently, a Half-Blood Witch or Wizard is still "one of us" even though the magical blood comes from only one side, just as a half-brother or half-sister is still a relative even though the shared "blood" comes only from one parent.

I haven't checked JKR's website for a long time, but she used to have a detailed explanation relating the prejudice of Pure-blood supremacists like the Malfoys against Muggle-borns ("the other kind," as eleven-year-old Draco calls them) to prejudice against Jews in Nazi Germany, something to do with the number of Muggle grandparents a person has (both Harry and Snape have two compared with none for Ron and four for Hermione, making Harry a Half-Blood like Snape even though his mother was a Muggle-born witch rather than a Muggle).

Side note: The whole concept of Muggle blood as "dirty" is almost silly considering that it's based on the *absence* of a trait (magical "blood"). Slughorn's reference to Harry's "genes" aside, the WW isn't looking at the question scientifically. It's more like, well, dog or horse breeding in the days before genetics, or the old concept of the blood royal (if you couldn't trace your ancestry to, say, William I, you weren't a suitable consort).

I doubt that I've fully answered your questions, but I hope I've helped a little.

Carol, hoping that others will join in the discussion and maybe link us to some of their own old posts