IBARW: Harry Potter, Racism, Homophobia, and Sexism, Ahoy!

[lavendertook]

RACISM

JKR is great on showing what institutionalized oppression looks like between a privileged group--pure bloods--and the oppressed--muggle and mudblood. She portrays a world where racist oppression is not mentioned as an issue. Yet, there are issues in how POC are narratively presented in the texts. JKR does better than your average white fantasy writer in that her world contains a number of POC.

The series presents us with a few deeply developed characters, and then a spiral of well developed characters, fading into caricature, fading into background characters. My problem with it is that none of the POC characters reach the inner sanctum of character development--not the deeply developed or even the next tier out.

If ever there was a character crying out to be developed, who was presented in enough varied situations in the book to have deserved some character development, the Indistinguishable Background Hobbit Award has to go to Dean. He appears in the beginning of the series as one of Harry's Gryffindor fellows, makes a recurrence later as Ginny's bf before being discarded (more on that in a bit), and then has a really interesting adventure that peripherally intersects with Harry's in DH, and still develops no discernible personality of his own--WTF?

I did see mention that JKR did have a storyline involving Dean that gave him more background than she wound up cutting from DH, but, you know, if its cuttable, then it's because his story isn't important or central enough to the overall text. Why is that? Why aren't any characters of color central enough here when there's a passel of white characters who are?

And yes, JKR does indicate the possibility that one of the most central characters, Dumbledore, may have a Native American mother, and is not necessarily only white, but that comes off like an afterthought, coyly presented through Harry's interpretation--it could have been interesting if we heard more about it, because identifying as a POC isn't only about skin color, but cultural affiliation and practice as well, and that throw away description doesn't give us any development at all.

And Kingsley gets made at least temporary minister of Magic at the end, but that doesn't make up for lack of character development and just being the strong, competent, black dude in the background.

Of the COC, Cho does get the most character development. It's a shame that Cho's strength, loyalty to people who aren't her current bf, first the dead Cedric and then her best friend who gives away the DA, and who she still stays loyal to anyway (I really liked that about her), relegates her to mainly a temporary role in OotP and then off stage for the rest of the series.

And this leads me to my biggest problem with the treatment of COC in the series--the way they are used as training love interests by the white characters, only to be tossed away when the proper white love interest becomes available--this was the role of both Dean and Cho. Then there's the girl COC as easily obtained and discarded, and hence, undesirable, date syndrome. One of the Weasley twins (I forget which, OK?) shows Harry and Ron how easy it is to get a date by snapping his fingers and getting Angelina all excited about being his date. This by itself would not necessarily be an issue of color, but when it is compounded by Ron and Harry getting the Patel sisters to be their last minute date, because obviously no one else would have been interested in them, we kind of see a trend here, and it's not pretty.

This across the board use of characters of color, and especially female characters of color, as discardable and undesirable love objects comes off racist to me and it sucked. Sure Lavender also plays the role of love object cast off when Ron gets together with Hermione, so its not just charactes of color being used in this role, but it is across the board enough to be an obvious problem. So much for the anti-racist themes in the series and their applicability to real people. So much for considering the needs of young POC reading these texts--not much for a young girl of color to hang her self-esteem on here.

And oy, I don't want to even get into the mess that was the portrayal of house elves, which I think was cracked from the word go. How are you going to get out an anti-racist, anti-discriminatory message when you use the 19th C essentialist ideas used against blacks in the US and women of all colors, that "well, those people really do like doing housework--it's in their nature." Since it is in house elves' nature, by JKR's presentation, to do service work for someone else, how can you even attempt a liberatory trajectory with their narrative threads? SO JKR tries to have her cake and eat it too by playing the elves for comedy while bringing some serious issues of discrimination to their portrayal--and this was just all WTF and icky to me.

I really hated the whole house elf thing, if you haven't caught on to that already.(-; Dobby, and especially Winky, seemed to have all the Step n Fetchit mannerisms of the minstrel show--I found it so offensive. "Oh wonderful Mr. Harry Potter!!!--Oh Miss Scarlett, MIss Scarlett!!!" Ugh. So the message ultimately being offered is not that no one should be exploiting a class of other people for domestic service, but one of "be kind to the hired help." Good advice, but hardly liberatory. The house elf portrayal was just full of fail.

HOMOPHOBIA

JKR owed us a portrayal of a clearly identified gay, lesbian, or bi character. No, I don't demand this of every heterocentric text. But I think it's owed in this series because JKR presents a clear portrayal of the homophobic insult. Dudley sneers at Harry with an accusation that Ron is his boyfriend. If a homophobic slur is made overt here, so is the possibility of homosexuality, and so is the need for a positive portrayal of homosexuality to counter act this slur, if we're supposed to be able to apply all the metaphorical anti-oppression themes to real life. Sure, the homophobic slur is uttered by a bad character and hence not as something that should be emulated, but there is nothing positive in the text about homosexuality to counter it--this is needed, and its a shame she let down her young queer readers this way.

SEXISM

The main part of my not being that anxious to start the series, and didn't until last summer, was the male-centeredness of the text. There are some terrific female characters here--well, mainly Hermione and Luna, but the main players here are all male--the hero, his father figure guides, and his antagonist. As I stated in my previous post, I really thing her theme of being a care giver does necessitate focus on male characters to have clear impact, and it's an important issue in reconstructing masculinity, but it could be told without such a relentless focus on the Search for the Father theme.

Yes, Lily is acknowledged as a better role model for Harry in the end--and that could be liberatory with cross-gender identification, but we don't get this developed in seeing her outside the role of love object for Snape and James, and the Good Mother. For it to be developed we needed to see some of the drama of her life choices. We don't get that. We just get absent mothers once again, because mothers as women with agency beyond motherhood is not a cultural priority. No wonder you can only protect yourself with a Patronus, and not a Matronus. And yeah, JKR does deconstruct that a little bit by making Snape's Patronus represent Lily, but then it just places Lily in the role of serving another again by being his Beatrice leading him to redemption.

And I know a lot of people loved Molly's confrontation with Bellatrix, with the obligatory yelling of "BITCH!" but I really hated it, that tired cliche, and it taking the Good Mother to take out the Bad Unmotherly Witch. Bleh. No, this isn't my liberation--if it feels like yours, great.

And I so wanted MacGonagell really developed as a character, as a caricature she was really cool. But we never got background on her. I so wanted to see more of her leadership of Hogwarts. Why wasn't she more in Dumbledore's confidence--there was so much room in so many ways to give us more of this strong character--I'm disappointed we didn't get it--it might have balanced the male centeredness of the text if her role as a mentor and authority figure was more central.

And if you're trying to remember what it was exactly that I did like about these books, I'll refer you to my previous post again. (-:

And I've got more to say, but I'll leave this post here and see if I can sneak it onto the Sunday IBARW roundup.



x posted to whileaway here.

Comments

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Great post!

I'd forgotten about Dudley's line bringing homosexuality within the narrative via homophobia. Do you remember which book it was from? (I haven't reread the early books recently enough to mentally locate every reference you make. The footnote reflex is useful, but it can be such a pain in the arse to have to do them.)

Re: the house-elves, you say:

Since it is in house elves nature, by JKR's presentation

My vague recollection is that this, like just about every other piece of information about the wizarding world that isn't directly empirical or deduced from piecing together multiple experiences, is something Harry learns from another character's mouth, and as such is open to qualification or outright contradiction by bringing in different points of view or demonstrations. That she *didn't* revisit this point is a problem, and Dobby's death scene especially leaves the question in suspense, as it is the last scene featuring a house-elf on "stage", as it were, because it's so fraught with self-contradiction. (The free slave dying to save the hero, very much in the racist tradition of magical Negroes, thus folding the oppressed character's chances for freedom into service of the oppressor's narrative for the sake of the personal qualities of said oppressor.)

And it's scary to see how many characters of colour were pushed aside romantically over the whole series.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

...and, also, any line about the house-elves coming from a witch or wizard is suspect, whether Rowling intended them to be true or not, when the witches and wizards have a vested interest in the elves' servitude. (And elves talking to magical humans are not necessarily free to express themselves, either, nor are there *any* elves in the books that, as far as I can recall, have not known servitude to offer different perspectives on the subject.)

Hm. I'd check the "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" pamphlet Rowling wrote, but this was also presented as coming from a wizard's POV.

[brouhaha.livejournal.com]

It was from the beginning of OOTP, where Dudley taunts Harry for having nightmares about Cedric's death. He says "Who's Cedric? Your boyfriend?" It made it into the film too.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Yup, that was it.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Also, homosexuality is also brought up again as a joke in DH, when Ron takes the polyjuice that makes him into a guy with a brown beard, and when Hermione asks Harry how he looks, Harry remarks that the brown hair is not his type. I realize that's a field day for H/R slashers who can then make it mean Ron's normal red hair is Harry's type, but as far as queer rights go, it's thumbs down. If you can make jokes about same-sex attraction, you can depict an actual identified queer person(s) respectfully.

Yup, it's mediated info on the house elves, but it's all we have to go on. We're nto given anything from the hosue elves directly to counteract it. And yup, Dobby does fulfill that magical negro role.

As we talked about in IM, it might have been JKR's best way of getting characters of color into the narrative after she had formed her core white characters, once she realized she had formed a core white world, but that makes clear that the place of COC is as an afterthought in her world.