Good for you, calling JRK out, but…

With all due respect, what did you expect of the thoroughly neoliberal Rowling? Look at her world, where blood and who your parents are is the most important thing. Look at the house elves, who are not just slaves, but slaves genetically programmed to be servile — by the wizards! (The joke in progressive circles is that an early draft of the books didn’t call them house elves…)

Only one character, Hermione, cares at all about this, and she’s portrayed as being ludicrous for doing so.

Note how all these kids in Hogwarts — the Harvard of the magic world — are so relentlessly white, white, white. I can remember only one non-white character, “Cho Chang” (whose name, as pretty well anyone with a social conscience noted, is one step away from ching chong).

But we see almost no dark people. Africa and India are two countries long associated with magic in literature and popular culture, England has quite a lot of non-white immigrants from both places, and yet none of them apparently make the grade for Hogwarts.

One of the truly tiresome things about talking about politics on the Internet these days is the endless use of Harry Potter as a neo-liberal metaphor. The classic radical response is this: “Read another book, already!”

Calling out JKR for being at best tone-deaf, most likely a TERF, perhaps worse: this is perfectly justified. Good for you.

I would add that pretty well all the superhero and fantasy series are the same — benevolent oligarchies where people who are intrinsically better than the rest of us protect the little humans. (You might note that the only two Marvel superheroes who come from working class backgrounds and worry about money are Ant-man and Spider-man — named after insects!)

Only one major series breaks this mold — it’s Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes over and over how unimportant hobbits are — how none of the hobbits in the Fellowship have any great skills at all or are particularly clever. The hobbits succeed simply by trying extremely hard and never giving up.

Anyone could do that. You don’t need a superpower or a title. It’s simply that most of us don’t.

The scene near the end of the books (or movies) where the hereditary king Aragorn leads everyone in bowing to the hobbits makes me tear up a little every time.

(I do need to note that JKR has given hundreds of millions of dollars to very worthy charities — she gave away 16% of her net worth in a single year at one point. This is much more important than saying dumb things on Twitter and my hat is off to her for this.)