(stolen joke) A transphobe, a racist and a antisemite walk into a bar. The bartender says: "hey arent you the woman who wrote those harry potter books?"
okay okay, i know jk rowling is horribly anti-semetic but i'd like to know how she is racist? i dont doubt it given the other info i have about her, but i'd like an example of her racism if possible
well there's the (only) asian character whose name is literally "Cho Chang"
or the one black person (of two!) named "Kingsly Shacklebolt"
oh and just for fun i'm pretty sure the one coded-irish character is constantly causing explosions? but we're getting into p fuzzy recall territory tbh, and i'm sure there's plenty more.
technically there's four Black folk in the Harry Potter books, but Rowling goes out of her way to not mention Lee Jordan despite Lee being a quidditch shoutcaster and allegedly the best friend of the Weasley twins, or Angelina Johnson, despite Angelina being Gryffindor's Chaser (god what an awful name for a sports role in this day and age) (and didn't she date one of the Weasley twins, too?) and she made Blaise Zabini a straight-up Death Eater-aligned Slytherin, so... Yeah, I'm gonna drill a couple more screws into the 'racist' sign she's wearing
I'd say there's five but I don't have the spoons to have the "Hermione is a black girl, there's no such thing as a tea cracker who needs a perm put in her hair for a school dance" argument with burger cracker liberals
i mean as you can see i'm in no position to be arguing the finer points of these books with anyone! but also i am curious about the perm stuff. is it just bc it makes look like poodles?
Most perms are ridiculously destructive even to coarse Afrikan hair-- a white girl doing that to herself, ESPECIALLY with any kind of regularity, is a recipe for straight-up baldness by the time she's thirty. Acid stripped, dry, and split-ended if she's lucky.
Canon was always really cagey about how she was supposed to look, but she was described with coarse hair and described as needing a perm for it in two non-consecutive years; that's all I need to perceive her as Black-- especially in a setting where I know the author can't help but mistreat Black folk.
If I remember rightly, there's a scene of him trying to turn a drink into some kind of alcohol and it exploding in his face. Cannot remember whether or not it was whiskey, but knowing Jowling....
she's like a massive unionist and even included a bit about how the IRA were just muggles who were jealous of wizards and so made bombs so they could match them in a pottermore post iirc (also iirc the ministry of magic doesnt recognise the sovereinty of the republic of ireland so there's just a single ministry of magic for both countries)
I can picture the sticky note shortlist that name came from, and I'm receiving a psychic premonition that she chose Cho Chang after writing and then crossing out something else.
horribly anti-semetic but i'd like to know how she is racist
european antisemitism is racist. it's theoretically possible to exclusively have a problem with religious practitioners of judaism, but that's not something that actually happens anymore. the goblins in her books are not shown to be practitioners of a bad cult, but bearers of undesirable racial traits.
The thing that always comes to mind first is that she named her one East Asian character Cho Chang and the one major Black character Kingsley Shacklebolt.
Like there's deeper shit than that but this is kinda quick and emblematic