Harry Potter

Tom Butala
Eng 141
Downs-Miers
9 May 2008
Diversity in the Harry Potter Series
I 1About a week or so ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article written by science fiction author Orson Scott Card about Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. 2The article was a commentary on a lawsuit that Rowling and her associates are currently pursuing over a guidebook to Harry Potter that may or may not infringe on Rowling’s intellectual property, crossing the line between citation and plagiarism. 3Card is known to be a bit of card, and in his article he calls the lawsuit spurious, saying that if Rowling can sue over a guidebook, then he should be able to sue Rowling for writing a book about a young boy of extraordinary talent who engages in airborne competition, and defeats a foe that threatens the survival of the entire human race with the guidance of a legendary teacher, love, and a little help from his friends.
II 1My initial reaction was that Card was off his rocker, and was maybe a little bitter over the success of Rowling’s books compared to his own, but now that the flames have died down, I see that he actually missed a parallel between his Ender series and the Harry Potters. 2Both series deal with themes of diversity and tolerance. 3In Speaker for the Dead¸ the sequel to Ender’s Game, Valentine Wiggin has written a Hierarchy of Alienness that classifies the other on a scale that goes from resident of a foreign country to alien race that is completely unable to communicate with the human race. 4The three books that follow Ender’s Game are spent trying to determine whether humans are able to coexist with the “Piggy” and “Bugger” races.
III 1In Harry Potter, Rowling explores this topic in a much different way. 2Her villain, the dark wizard Lord Voldemort has an Adolf Hitler-like obsession with blood purity. 3In Rowling’s Wizarding World, there has been some amount of interbreeding with non-wizards (called muggles), which allows for magical ability to act like a bit like genes. 4Sometimes a person born into a magical family will not have magical powers, and on the flipside, a person with magical abilities can be born into a muggle family. This causes problems in the wizarding world, as some wizards, including Voldemort and his followers place a lot of emphasis on being pure-blooded and think that muggle-born and half-blood wizards are second-class citizens. 5Voldemort in particular thinks that these people should all be destroyed. 6These wizards also believe that any pure-blood family that interbreeds with muggles or non-human magical species are traitors, and worse than the muggle-born. 7This aspect of the story serves as a metaphor for race relationships in our own world.
IV 1Rowling takes this aspect further as she expands the series by introducing the reader to a number of non-human magical species. 2She introduces us to house elves, giants, centaurs, goblins, werewolves and many other groups. 3While the giants and centaurs seem to be allowed to exist like American Indians on reservations, house elves are very much a slave race. 4The mention of a Goblin Uprising also suggests that they are not as free as humans are.
V 1While much of the wizarding world objects to these creatures and species, it is shown that Hogwarts is a place free of prejudice based on blood-purity or and species. 2Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is shown giving teaching positions to a werewolf, a centaur, a half-giant. 3It is significant that these controversial persons are often more reliable and trustworthy than their human counterparts.