In the wake of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, as we wait with bated breath for the moment Harry Potter and the Cursed Child comes to Broadway, I’ve been revisiting the story of Draco Malfoy and pondering how some of the lessons his life provides tend to be overshadowed by the exploits of Harry, Hermione, and Ron.
A quick reading of Draco is that he’s a racist, a white supremacist, and a product of his awful environment. For some people, the analysis of Harry Potter’s nemesis ends there. But I’ve always thought that there was more to the character than just a broad villain. I’ve always seen Draco as both a tragic figure and a character that fans of the Harry Potter books can, and should, learn from. Draco’s character arc is something that is especially important in the times we’re embarking on now.
“So what can we learn from Draco?” you might be wondering. What we can glean from his life is insight, through the lens of Rowling’s fiction, into how racism functions in the real world. More than that, Draco also exemplifies the ways in which a person can grow out of their upbringing and environment and strive to do better.
Still scratching your head about this? I’ll break it down:
Draco’s racism wasn’t inborn; it’s how he was raised.
A classic mistake I’ve noticed even among well-meaning people is the assumption that racists are somehow just born racist. No one is born a racist; racist convictions are taught. One of the best examples of this indoctrination can be seen in Draco’s upbringing.
Draco’s parents, Narcissa and Lucius, raised him to believe he was better than others because of his pureblood status. They instilled in him the belief that the world revolved around purebloods only, and that anyone else—half-blood, muggleborn, etc.—had lower places on the hierarchy of worth. Draco’s parents taught him this because they were taught it by their parents. Lucius and Narcissa never stopped to think that maybe their parents were wrong; instead they passed this narrow-minded thinking down to their son because for them, there was no other way to live.
What’s important to remember is that Draco’s parents, in their own twisted, ignorant way, thought they were teaching their son valuable life lessons. They assumed they were doing the best for their son.
The concept of love is hardly ever brought up by us muggles when discussing racist home environments; it seems like we assume that the parents are always knowledgeable about the negative and problematic concepts they’re passing down to their children. The wild part about racism in the home, though, is that some parents assume they are demonstrating love for their child by teaching them what they think is the way of the world.
In her Pottermore short story on Draco’s life, J.K. Rowling writes about Draco feeling special due to his upbringing: “From the time when he could talk, it was made clear to him that he was triply special: firstly as a wizard, secondly as a pure-blood, and thirdly as a member of the Malfoy family,” she wrote. This sentiment echoes the same sentiment Jonathan Odell, a speaker and self-proclaimed “recovering racist” wrote about in his 2015 Salon article, “I am a recovering racist: I was somehow taught hate as a gift of love.” Odell describes a moment when he was talking to an all-white fifth grade class about racism in 1950s and 1960s Mississippi. A kid asked him if he liked having his “own special place in the restaurant” when he was growing up, and instead of giving a PC answer, he told the class the truth.
“‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘It felt good. I felt like I was on the winning team or voted most popular. I never thought of it before, but yes, it made me feel special,’” he wrote.
…[T]he hardest thing to admit was that my racism and its inherent privileges were gifted to me by devoted parents, dedicated teachers, righteous preachers—an entire white community conspired to make me feel special. These were good people. …That would make racism a gift of love! As toxic as those gifts were, they were presented to me out of love, by someone I loved. What adult, much less child, doesn’t want to feel special? What child is going to say, “No, I don’t want your gift because it takes away from others!” We hunger for the experience of feeling special and are grateful to those who see that specialness within us. No wonder it’s so hard to uproot racism from our souls.
Rowling herself writes that the one thing that Draco benefited from while growing up was the love of his parents. Yet, it was that exact same love and devotion that compelled them to pass down their racist beliefs.
In some ways, Draco is himself a victim of his environment. But he is also an unquestioning perpetuator of his environment, inflicting his bad morals on others around him instead of realizing that everyone is his equal. He learns this lesson when it’s almost too late, and in order for the realization for finally sink in and stick, he learns it in the most excruciating of ways.
Uprooting racism is a long, tough road, and only a few will take it because of the rude awakening that comes with it.
As a black woman in America, I’ve seen how easy and comforting it is for some of my white former classmates and acquaintances to stay in that bubble of racial ignorance. I’m sure it’s a lot easier, for example, to blame the nation’s problems on someone getting killed for running away or selling loose cigarettes than it is to confront the racist ideologies and white supremacy that allows for police to terrorize certain neighborhoods. It’s simpler to do that than to confront the reality of the basis of our current policing system—the slave patrols of the 1800s. I could go on and on, but it’s a luxury to comfortably complain about race if you’re at the top of the race-based food chain.
Similarly, Draco and his family were comfortable at the top, yet they complained about impertinent muggle-borns and people like Harry and Sirius who fought for equality; to people like Draco and his parents, Harry, Sirius, and other purebloods who went against the hierarchy were blood traitors. Did the Malfoys really have any room to complain about anything? No. But what they were worried about and feared most was their way of life being upended by those who thought differently than them. If equality was actually gained, they wouldn’t be special anymore. The perceived loss of power is what terrified them, and it’s that same loss of power that still terrifies too many people in America today.
But what happens when you realize you never truly had that power to begin with? The Malfoys were forced to come to grips with this reality when Voldemort returned to power and actually showed that his master plan benefited only himself. Just as the recent election here in the United States hinged heavily on America’s still-virulent strain of racism and sexism, Voldemort gamed the wizarding world’s existing prejudicial support of blood superiority and rode that wave back into power. Draco’s family followed Voldemort to secure their own privilege and sense of superiority, but soon realized that the power they sought had too steep of a price tag.
To quote Rowling from Pottermore:
Draco’s world now fell apart. From having been, as he and his father had believed, on the cusp of authority and prestige such as they had never known before, his father was taken from the family home and imprisoned, far away, in the fearsome wizard prison guarded by Dementors. Lucius had been Draco’s role model and hero since birth. Now he and his mother were pariahs among the Death Eaters; Lucius was a failure and discredited in the eyes of the furious Lord Voldemort.
Part of that price tag included Draco being drafted to kill Hogwarts’ headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. It was then that Draco realized the path of Voldemort wasn’t the path he wanted to take. Coming up against the realization that his supposed superiority was all an illusion forced Draco—and to a certain extent, his parents—to forcefully wake up and finally see reality for what it was. This was expertly portrayed in the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as Draco (Tom Felton) faces agony over his task throughout the film, culminating in a scene in which he cries hysterically to himself in the bathroom. When he sees himself in the mirror, it looks as if he doesn’t know who is staring back at him.
Once again, to quote Rowling:
…The ideas that Draco had about himself, and his place in the world, were disintegrating. All his life, he had idolized a father who advocated violence and was not afraid to use it himself, and now that his son discovered in himself a distaste for murder, he felt it to be a shameful failing. …Draco’s changed, yet still conflicted, personality revealed itself in his actions during the remainder of the war between Voldemort and those who were trying to stop him. Although Draco had still not rid himself of the hope of returning their family to their former high position, his inconveniently awakened conscience led him to try—half-heartedly, perhaps, but arguably as best he could in the circumstances—to save Harry from Voldemort when the former was captured and dragged to Malfoy Manor.
Of course, the real world version of confronting and rethinking one’s own hatred and racism doesn’t usually involve being recruited as a reluctant hit man. But what it often does involve is a severe slap in the face that usually only comes when the universe decides, after gently trying to teach the same lesson over and over again, that there are no other options.
It feels like we’re in one of those slap-in-the-face times now. In the wake of the election, hate crimes have increased. Many people are shocked by the rise in racism, but Deborah Lauter, the Anti-Defamation League’s senior vice president for policy and programs, told NPR that the uptick in these crimes should serve as that universal slap that demands our attention.
“…I would refer to it more as a wake-up call,” she said. “The Anti-Defamation League has always said we need to fight hate in a comprehensive way, and now that it’s been exposed so graphically and in the public’s face, I think what we need is for people to really heed that wake-up call and stand up to hate.”
Draco doesn’t really begin to stand up to anything until after the war is completely over. But to his credit, he does begin walk the path towards internal growth.
Recovering from racism—and destroying it for good—requires diligence.
In her Pottermore story, Rowling offers readers a glimpse of Draco’s adulthood and his quest to be a better parent to his son Scorpius:
The events of Draco’s late teens forever changed his life. He had had the beliefs with which he had grown up challenged in the most frightening way: he had experienced terror and despair, seen his parents suffer for their allegiance, and had witnessed the crumbling of all that his family had believed in. People whom Draco had been raised, or else had learned, to hate, such as Dumbledore, had offered him help and kindness, and Harry Potter had given him his life. After the events of the second wizarding war, Lucius found his son as affectionate as ever, but refusing to follow the same old pure-blood line.
Draco ends up marrying Astoria Greengrass, who also flipped from the dark side, and together they strive to teach Scorpius a more accepting point of view. Rowling wrote that she expects Draco to still feel a pull toward the dark side while working furiously to remain in the light:
I see in his hobbies further confirmation of his dual nature. The collection of Dark artefacts harks back to family history, even though he keeps them in glass cases and does not us them. However, in his strange interest in alchemical manuscripts, from which he never attempts to make a Philosopher’s Stone, hints at a wish for something other than wealth, perhaps even the wish to be a better man. I have high hopes that he will raise Scorpius to be a much kinder and more tolerant Malfoy than he was in his own youth.
The road towards a better mindset doesn’t come overnight, and it definitely doesn’t come through magic. Becoming a better person requires hard work. It requires being uncomfortable (something Draco and his wife do feel from time to time, since Draco’s parents are somewhat disappointed in how they’re raising Scorpius). To that end, it requires standing up to people who are wrong. Just as Draco and his wife must stand up to Narcissa and Lucius and any other pureblood who criticizes them, we in the real world have to stand up to hate whenever possible. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child explores this further, but I won’t spoil it for you—suffice it to say, it contains several moments that could be considered the culmination of Draco’s struggle with his upbringing.
To fight hate, Lauter says, people who call themselves allies must mobilize. “It’s imperative that good people speak out,” she said. “So if they do witness someone who is being harassed or bullied—because they have a hijab on, for example—they need to be an ally, they need to step forward and say this is not acceptable. For people who see incidents in their community—whether it’s a swastika or other bigoted incident—come together as a community and stand up and say our neighborhood will not tolerate this.”
The importance of this call to action can’t be stressed enough. If we are to truly get rid of the Voldemorts of our world, we must be willing to be uncomfortable, face our own demons, and denounce hurtful acts. Otherwise, we’ll end up like Narcissa and Lucius: too far gone and too complacent to do anything about our problems, even though we face severe peril because of them.
So what did we learn here? Certainly not that Draco is a saint. He is, like Jonathan Odell and many others, a recovering racist. As such, he will always be, in some form or fashion, in the proverbial doghouse as he works to become a better person.
However, we can take as a hopeful sign Draco’s efforts to take responsibility for his past actions and the way he plans to live his life as he moves into the future. The toughest thing about the falsehoods at the heart of racism is that the lies lives on as long as a person denies their own culpability. For racism to exist, it must also be ignored. But once a person recognizes and starts to question their racist beliefs, it becomes more difficult for the lie to sustain itself. As the saying goes, once you know better, you do better. “Doing better” is much easier than it sounds, but if someone like Draco can work to create a better future for himself and his son, then we can draw from his struggle inspiration and motivation to create better futures for ourselves as well.
Monique Jones is an entertainment blogger and founder of JUST ADD COLOR, a multicultural pop culture site. Jones has acted as a consultant for Magic: The Gathering and is the founder of the upcoming MoniqueJonesConsulting.com, an online consulting business geared towards entertainment creators who are developing characters of color.
“White supremacist” in your intro puts too much of our world’s problems into this fictional world I think. Draco was clearly raised to put pure bloods over other wizards, and wizards over muggles and non-human magical beings. But I don’t think there are any references to the Malfoys (or the Voldemort movement in general) putting white wizards over other ethnicities.
Of course Draco’s gradual climb out of his parents muck is part of the story. He refused to kill Dumbledore and Harry not because he was a coward but because he knew it was wrong. We rarely see Draco interact with the main cast without other observers present (Crabbe and Goyle, Snape, his mother or father) so it’s not clear how he would have interacted with people who were different from him without the outside pressure.
Yes, I really enjoyed reading this. Draco has always intrigued me, so I appreciate the deep-dive into his story!
I would agree with StrongDreams above: “white supremacist” doesn’t really work here. Draco, and his family could be described as “bigots” perhaps, but I don’t think the argument of pureblood = white works. And the fact they are white themselves doesn’t correlate with that thinking either.
For example, this image from the film features about 20 deatheaters. I count 5 members who likely do not consider themselves “white”:
Once again, I appreciate the article and providing an interesting perspective of Draco Malfoy.
Cf. Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific’s “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
Bigotry is indeed a more apt term.
The problem here is that there is a reasonably strong suggestion in the books and movies that a pureblood child is more likely to be a wizard than is a half blood or a muggle born child. At the very least, the instance of muggle born wizards seems to be rare and random, whereas almost every wizarding family we hear of seem to have an extremely high instance of their progeny having wizarding ability.
Which… complicates the issue. That means that magic is hereditary in some way, which means pureblood supremacists might not be wrong. The ability to perform magic is obviously central to the Wizarding community’s continued existence, and interbreeding with muggles may in fact be diluting the ability of the Wizarding population to propagate itself, a fact reinforced by the fairly insular nature of wizarding communities in general.
That wouldn’t be as much raw bigotry as it would be a desire to preserve a way of life, which in the real world tends to be regarded as laudable; all sorts of minority communities protest loudly to maintain their own traditions and ways of life. And given the way the vast, VAST majority of the wizarding world (even well meaning members like Harry and Hermione) already treats Muggles… well, the distinctions between all these groups seems hard to suss out, for me. Voldemort is violent and evil, sure, but the society as a whole is already quite bigoted, and quite comfortable in that, and if you throw in the fact that the Malfoy’s may very well be fighting to keep their entire way of life/species from being bred out of existence, it sheds a different light on the subject.
@drcox @3 – I always think the same thing when I see an article with this theme. And the introductory section of this article drives it home even more.
“White supremacist” is an American reading, seeing everything through the lens of the United States. If this was set in color bar America, there would not be such things as squibs and muggleborns. That would be like an America where black couples commonly spontaneously gave birth to white children and white couples to black children. There are quite plainly no such things as muggle and wizard races. The Malfoys are just class snobs.
While ‘white supremacy’ may not be an apt term, ‘racism’ certainly is since race is a social construct that has long been based not necessarily on skin color but rather on any trait presumed to be heritable (whether by actual parentage or by association with a particular place or culture).
@4/Andrew: No. No. Ron explicitly states his belief that wizards would have died out had they not married muggles, Hagrid cites Lily and Hermione as examples of muggle-borns who were more talented than most purebloods, and several other characters echo this same understanding of wizards vs. muggles throughout the books. Then there are the examples like Merope Gaunt (and implications regarding families like the Crabbes, Goyles, and Carrows) illustrating the folly of pureblood fanaticism taken to its logical conclusion. There’s no more in-universe evidence supporting the legitimacy of anti-muggle racism in JKR’s world than there is for similar racism in the real world.
Applying ridiculously broad labels of good and bad on our own political situation while being nuanced about Draco’s world of magic and pureblood doesn’t work.
Rowling’s basis for the evil of the purebloods is Nazi Germany, and it makes a better comparison.
And I was going to mention the song from SOUTH PACIFIC, too.
https://youtu.be/OAZ8yOFFbAc
@@.-@, @7,
There is a very interesting parallel here to religious minorities (e.g. Jews) that have strong traditions of marrying in the faith to keep the faith from being diluted. I never thought of that before in the context of HP. However, it is certainly clear that JKR states that the wizarding population is too small to exclusively inbreed. And we never saw the purebloods specifically argue that marrying muggles was “diluting magic.” (In HP7 they claimed it was “stealing” magic which is not the same thing.) If that was their reason, it was mistaken and also never stated in the texts. It mostly seems that JKR was going for racial purity as snobbery, not racial purity as a matter of survival.
@9 I think European aristocracies are likely a better parallel to purebloods than religious groups. A fair number of noble families managed to inbreed themselves out of existence, though I don’t know how much it contributed to their overall decline.
She is clearly giving us the modern American real-world equivalent of Draco’s mindset and not claiming that he is literally a white supremacist. Stop harping on the semantics and focus on the meaning.
But it fails to be the equivalent.
Actually “pure-blood supremacist” is a pretty good description of the attitudes of the Malfoys and other wizard families. And a fairly decent equivalency, as described by #11.
Good article. I grew up in the days before the Civil Rights Act, when a lot of practices that we find offensive today were an accepted part of life. It took some heroic actions by the civil rights movement to get people to open their eyes, and their hearts, and realize how wrong things really were.
The Deatheaters are modelled on Nazis who think that Aryans/wizards are better than other races/muggles. The Malfoys combine that with the attitude of an old noble family that considers upstarts with commoner ancestors/muggleborns as beneath them. Both elements of the Malfoys’ beliefs are based on European history, not America.
MatthewB @@@@@ 11:
She is clearly giving us the modern American real-world equivalent of Draco’s mindset and not claiming that he is literally a white supremacist.
Actually, what she said was:
A quick reading of Draco is that he’s a racist, a white supremacist, and a product of his awful environment. For some people, the analysis of Harry Potter’s nemesis ends there.
This implies some kind of standard, obvious analysis of Draco, not just something translated to “modern American real-world” terms. Moreover, the first and third parts seem pretty clearly part of the story, not just “translations to modern American equivalents”; the “product of an awful environment” — with specific Potterverse examples as well as American equivalents — is kind the point of the whole article. As for the “white supramcist” point, I was admittedly a bit confused — I don’t remember anything from the movies explicitly specifying Draco in that way (though since I’ve only seen each movie once, I may have missed something). But since I haven’t read the books, I was willing to consider that this was something the movies had maybe left out.
So it’s not necessarily obvious — at least to people who haven’t read the books carefully — that “Draco is a white supremacist” isn’t a literal part of the original story, rather than some transformed contemporary American equivalence. (And since there are white supremacists in the UK and various other European countries, it’s hardly something exclusively “American”.)
I didn’t say white supremacists are American, I said interpreting these non-American books through a lens of white supremacy is an American mistake. By all means attempt to show that the Malfoys are white supremacists of a UK or European tradition. You’ll get it even more wrong.
In my opinion, Draco Malfoy has a lot more similarities with the snobbish English aristocrats of which Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and their ilk come from. He is clearly an elitist and a bigot but I’m not sure Malfoy is a particularly relevant example about digging out racism, either in Britain or the US. The root of it is that when you get down to it, Malfoy’s stake in the matter is pretty low. Yes, his family stand to lose and presumably did lose a lot of their pride as a uniquely special ruling caste in the aftermath of Voldermort’s defeat but we don’t receive any indication they lost their privileged economic position. Once Voldermort was gone, there was no indication that the Malfoys were in danger of starving or being killed by vengeful muggleborns.
While I can respect Rowling immensely for never treating racism as acceptable, I think she misses how much racism in the modern context is a prop for economic and social power. It has always been particularly strong in the American south, where successive generations of the southern establishment has scarcely had a better view of southern whites and used fear of black Americans to intimidate as much as flatter their pride. What happened in Britain and the US last year (and in all likelihood will happen in France this year) didn’t just happen because millions of whites were glad to have a candidate that finally “said it like it is” but because they finally had a candidate who said he would do something for them very specifically. If you want a modern examination of this phenomenon, then Strangers in Their Own Land is an excellent buy. Its pretty easy to see why phrases like ‘check your privilege’ and ‘political correctness’ would set off a lot of people mentioned in the book.
Now I should note I don’t view this as a sympathetic mindset. Many of the people who voted for Trump have railed against every civil rights advance in history before quietly accepting it after the fact. And there is a lot of bigotry and hatred wrapped up in the idea city people [e.g., minorities] are “cutting in front of me”. And only someone who already doesn’t really want to do anything productive would use a sect as minor as the SJW crowd as an excuse not to act. There are hints that Snape or Pettigrew, particularly the former, are something of a cipher for how racism and poverty become intertwined but ultimately Rowling chose not to explore.
Whatever, he’s clearly like a white supremist and reminds us of children who were in our own schools if we went to school with any racist bullies. The only racially charged remark I can remember in the series came from Draco’s schooltime girlfriend, Pansy Parkinson, when she said Angelina Johnson’s braids looked like worms.
@19/Noneofyourbusiness: “Mudblood” is a racist slur, one Draco used frequently. Attempting to distinguish antipathy based on skin color from antipathy based on other elements of ancestry or physical appearance utterly misses the point. The blood supremacy of the Potterverse isn’t an analogue for racism—it is racism, period (or should I say, full stop, to avoid American bias? :-). Sadly, it’s a type of racism that isn’t even fictional.
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An aspect of Draco’s character arc that is illustrative, but seems to be overlooked in this discussion, is that his turnaround was helped somewhat by his late recognition that some of the people whom he had considered inferior were actually those best positioned to help him and his family. Convincing people to stop propagating bigotry because it is the moral thing to do is ideal, but getting people to live their lives with a more inclusive worldview out of a sense of enlightened self-interest can probably achieve the desired results a bit more quickly. If Draco achieved any outward changes not out of genuine conviction but merely to improve things for the sake of Scorpius and the family estate, it was still a step in the right direction.
Clearly the label of “white supremacist” is distracting from the thrust of the article, that it’s hard for someone to escape the prejudice of their parents.
I wasn’t familiar with Jonathan Odell. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
It’s amazing the different narratives from each side explaining why people voted the way they did. With every news outlet and website so specialized, it is entirely too easy to be blind to any point of view but your own.
As for Malfoy, for the first five books, I thought he was never very well written. Every book he was brash, arrogant, and mostly stupid. In the end, he’d fall on his face, be humiliated, and be back to the same character at the beginning of the next year.
I know she would have never written it this way, but I wonder if Potter stumbled into Draco’s train car instead of Ron’s, and Draco was smooth enough for just that ride to be his friend. Would Harry have ended up in Slytherin? Only Ron’s warning gave him the information that informed his choice with the sorting hat.
@17 But the author of this article is not interpreting the books here. That isn’t the point of this article. She isn’t trying to say that Rowling based the struggle between Muggles/Muggleborns and bigoted purebloods on racism in America. Whether that struggle is more aptly applied to race, religion, or class is not the point, that doesn’t matter – it all comes down to bigotry, and that’s what this article is about. How to look at the story, particularly Draco’s character progression, and use it to fight the bigotry we deal with today.
Great article – and I think people are maybe trying to take it too literaly? I didn’t get the impression that she was trying to make a 1:1 comparison between Draco/purebloods and American racism/white supremacy, but just looking at the thought patterns behind being raised in bigotry and the process of overcoming it, especially when you were the one raised to be superior.
Honestly, I wish you HAD gone on to discuss Cursed Child because while it wasn’t perfect, Draco and Scorpius were my favorite part (as well as Draco’s interactions with Harry) and I really wish Astoria hadn’t just been quietly killed off screen because I REALLY want to know how that relationship worked, how it came about, how they fell in love, etc.
Also – I think your point about Draco’s parents is really interesting because one of my favorite moments is when Narcissa basically throws it all away (by not revealing that Harry is still alive) for the chance to save Draco. She’s still a villain. She’s still basically self serving. She probably still believes till the end of her life that she’s better than others. But in some some small, tiny way she’s realizing it’s just not worth it and in the end a mother’s love for her son is what saves the day – I always find it a kind of interesting mirror to Lily.
@@@@@ 7 – I am not making the case that pureblood wizards are ALWAYS better than muggle born (or of “mixed descent” or halfbloods or whatever). And the anecdotal examples your provided actually prove the point, which is that muggle born wizards like Hermione and Lily are exceptions to the rule, notable for that reason.
And Ron is hardly an expert witness on anything. The evidence in the books for this is so obvious you must be overlooking it for that reason; the pureblood, or mostly pureblood, Wizarding community is TINY. And yet a huge fraction of the magical folk we hear about are purebloods; assuming the English magical community is somewhat representative, it seems like vastly more than 50% of wizards are pureblood. The Muggle community is exponentially larger, and yet there are far fewer Muggle born wizards and witches, despite the fact that Hogwarts seems to have a 100% hit rate in finding magic users.
So yeah, obviously some Muggle borns witches & wizards are more talented than their pureblood counterparts, and obviously some “pureblood” kids don’t actually have the ability to do magic and are squibs (though I’ll point out Merope can do magic, but like Ariana, chooses/is forced not to due to abuse). But there seems to be an extremely strong correlation between the magical ability of your parents and your own capabilities.
And again, even benign, pro-Muggle wizards and witches like the Weasley’s show absolutely no compunction about brutally abusing their Muggle counterparts whenever it results in even the slightest, most marginal gain. Mr. Weasley, who I think represents the most pro-Muggle viewpoint we get to know outside Hermione and Harry, clearly also views them as some sort of lesser beings. So at the end of the day, how much worse are the Malfoys? The somewhat sadistic eagerness to do casual harm to Muggles is obviously evil and bad, but again, not far removed from the ordinary way of doing things in the wizarding world (which includes the regular wiping of memories, lets not forget). All that sets them apart is that they don’t want to introduce non-Wizarding blood into their family line, in what seems to be a perfectly justified fear that it will dilute the potential for future generations to do magic. Might also lead to inbreeding, of course.
Throwing aside minor genetic issues like a slight predisposition to diseases like sickle cell anemia, ethnic background is almost meaningless from a genetic standpoint for human beings. Some phenotypical differences don’t make folks of African or South Asian descent any different, really, from a Scandinavian or Arab person. But if Arab people could fly (and other ethnic groups could sometimes spontaneously manifest the ability, maybe .001% of the time), and part of that ability was connected to a genetic disposition only found in Arab people, I don’t think its insane to want to preserve that ability.
As an African-American woman, I find it interesting — and annoying — that so many people think that “white supremacy” can’t be applied to the Malfoys and the rest of the Death Eaters. I certainly saw them as a parallel, even though Nazi Germany is probably Rowling’s primary influence.
The Death Eaters believe in purity of blood, which is the same belief that many white supremacists have. It’s one of the reasons white supremacists hate people who “marry outside of their race”. They were allegedly “diluting the purity of white blood.” It was also the justification in the past for enslaving people who had “one drop” of black blood.
Anyone who marries a “mudblood” in HP, or who has any sympathy for people other than “purebloods” considered a “blood traitor”. White supremacists use the term “race traitor”.
The Death Eaters show no compunction about killing people who are “mudbloods”. Same as the KKK who have no compunction about killing someone whose blood is “impure” — usually black people and Jewish people.
Let’s not use the term “bigotry” to describe something in HP that involves killing people. Racism in HP is about wiping out an entire type of people based on their “blood” or “blood status”. (See also Umbridge and her throwing Muggleborns to the Dementors in DH.) It’s just the same as the white supremacists here in the United States.
Oh, and the term “mudblood”? Here in the U.S. “mud people” is frequently used in White Supramacist literature as a term for someone like me. I think there’s a good chance Rowling intentionally went with something similar for her books.
@21/tbgh : Arguably, the importance of Draco’s struggles with his upbringing in the last two books is made more notable by the contrast with the flatter, more generic rich-boy bully of the first five books.
@25/Andrew: “But there seems to be an extremely strong correlation between the magical ability of your parents and your own capabilities.” I don’t think the text supports this at all. A major theme of the series is quite the opposite: Dumbledore explicitly states his belief in the primacy of choices over destiny (whether from prophecy, ancestry, or expectations) in determining what a person becomes, and pretty much all of Harry’s and Voldemort’s story arcs (not to mention Neville’s) illustrate the point. Favoring a person based on characteristics or group associations beyond his or her control is just as bad as condemning the person for them.
@26/kb_run: It is certainly true that the ‘whiteness’ favored by white supremacists is really a concept of purity, based in ancestry, that just so happens to be associated with pale skin. But real-world white supremacists typically shun people who are outwardly ‘white’ yet are believed to have non-white ancestors, whereas the HP books imply (and the movies explicitly show) that the Death Eaters and other pureblood elitists include outwardly dark-skinned members among their ranks. Favoring the term ‘blood supremacy’ over ‘white supremacy’ is merely framing the discussion in a way that gives apologists less wiggle room to avoid interpreting the attitude for the racism it is.
“it seems like vastly more than 50% of wizards are pureblood. “
That’s directly contradicted in text. I think Arthur explains that there are hardly any real purebloods left.
@29 I seem to recall that while there’s only a handful of certifiably pureblood families, there’s a lot more mostly “pure” families with some muggleborn ancestors in the tree. So muggleborns and their immediate descendants are still outnumbered.
@@@@@ 28 – I think you are misinterpreting Dumbledore’s intent. His point about destiny as it relates to Harry is as you say; we make our own choices in the world, and despite similarly loveless upbringing’s Harry and Voldemort make vastly different choices. But you cannot choose to do magic. Hell, you can’t even choose NOT to do magic. It’s inborn, hereditary, automatic. Harry can choose to oppose Voldemort of his own free will because he is inherently magical. A Muggle cannot do that. I find Rowling to be pretty simplistic on the metaphysical stuff in general, but in this instance it’s a moot point. Certain people in this universe are inherently more able. Someone born colorblind cannot “choose” between yellow and purple; they cannot even see the difference (disclaimer: I know nothing about color blindness so perhaps this analogy is terrible, but hopefully people get the point).
Moreover, your thought that “favoring a person based on characteristics or group associations is just as bad…” is problematic as well. Racism is bad because skin color is entirely meaningless in just about every way. But being able to do magic vs not do magic? That’s an incredibly meaningful difference. It is not necessarily a negative to recognize that, and want to preserve that ability for future generations. Or to want to preserve a Wizarding culture, even; in the real world, minorities have every right to demand equal treatment while insisting on maintaining a separate cultural identity. Of course, as I mentioned, the casual disregard and bigotry towards Muggles is despicable, but that isn’t a trait unique to the Malfoys or even purebloods or folks who might be Voldemort-aligned: effectively every wizard and witch, even the most benign, view Muggles as beneath and/or less than magical humans. The continued existence of magic in general relies on the constant, unthinking, even cheerful abuse of the Muggle population. As far as Muggles are concerned, the ONLY difference between Voldemort and every other witch/wizard is that Voldemort isn’t planning on hiding his actions from them.
@@@@@ 29 – I think noblehunter has the right of it. There are almost no lineages that are solely pureblood, going back hundreds of years or whatever. But I don’t think Draco ever insults Harry as a Half Blood or anything like that; I think his parentage is considered fully magical, even if his family tree isn’t. So if we view magical ability as a dominant hereditary mutation, and one that commonly occurs in the normal course of genetic replication, then I think we come out with the right idea. As long as there isn’t an overwhelming amount of non-magical blood in a family tree, wizarding families are highly likely to pass on the ability to perform magic. Muggles will, on very rare but not unheard-of occasions, generate magical offspring.
@31 You’re missing a piece of data: correlation of squibs to muggleborns. It could be so long as at least one parent has magical ability, they may have the same likelihood of wizard kids as a couple of pureblood parents. Only without the inbreeding issues, if one can infer it from the small families.
Agreed. We’re not going to get enough data on this to come up with even a reasonable theory, because the internal consistency of Rowling’s world-building isn’t thought out particularly well. Or at all, really. We have two pertinent pieces of data that we know for sure – that magical ability can pop up in muggles, though it is rare enough that it’s worth comment, and that wizarding families have extremely high instances of passing on magical ability.
And again, it worth noting that Voldemort and his followers aren’t that much worse than the pro-Muggle Wizarding community!!! Voldemort and his folks only differ from the run of the mainstream magical community in that (a) they want to reveal the existence of magic to Muggles (or at least stop hiding) and (b) he wants to sit at the head of that society. That’s it. In every other meaningful way, the vast majority of wizards are just as bad as Voldemort. Endanger and hurt muggles for laughs? Apparently a meaningful number of wizards consider it a good time. Abuse and exploit muggles for trivial personal gain? Even our heroes and extended Team Harry do it all the time. And while Hermione and perhaps Harry may be the exception, you don’t see the Wizarding community at large fighting for equal rights for other creatures.
So yea… Draco and his ilk aren’t the problem. If anything, the attitude of the Malfoys seems almost more legitimate than the rest of the magical community’s. Their entire society is predicated, in part, on the idea that Muggles are subhuman (so to speak), and that the only reason to avoid openly practicing their craft is the annoyance that would result from being asked for favors. Once you assume that, the Malfoys only take the idea to its logical (and perhaps genetically correct) conclusion.
This was a wonderful article, thank you.
@31/Andrew: You misinterpreted my interpretation. My point was that assessments of a wizard’s wort should be based on his ability to cultivate his wizarding skills (which is under his control) not the wizarding abilities of his parents (which isn’t); similar ideas apply to assessments of squibs and muggles. It’s like if you have the skills to be an elite baseball player, it’s fine to prefer to associate with people who share your skills and interests, but it’s not okay to disparage someone because their parents prefer soccer or to mock/bully someone with lesser athletic gifts.
@35/Andrew: “perhaps genetically correct” You do realize that here and in @25 + @31 you are essentially justifying pureblood racism because…eugenics? Hmm. Perhaps not the best way to win friends and influence people. ;-)
I have to grudgingly admit, though, that you raise a good point in that the attitudes of the Death Eaters and their sympathizers differ from the more general magical population more in degree than kind (although my reading of the text is that the typical wizard’s attitude toward muggles is more wary indifference than actual animosity or sense of superiority). However, this might actually reinforce the OP’s goal in writing the piece since here in the real world we’ve got the same issue: those of us who aspire not to be racist, sexist, or unduly biased go about our lives taking advantage of many more latent prejudices, privileges, and misconceptions than we’d like to admit. In an odd way, perhaps it is slightly easier for someone like Jonathan Odell or Draco Malfoy—a person who grew up steeped in a racist subculture that provided him great advantages and told him they were nothing he should hide—to ‘check his privilege’ given the right situation simply because he has no pretense that he isn’t privileged. The rest of us might have to work a bit harder to recognize where we might be falling short in that regard.
“We don’t talk about our Squib cousin.”
“We don’t care what happened to Montague, he got in our way.”
“I took all my parents’ memories away and moved them to Australia, for their own safety.”
“There never was a Dark Wizard who didn’t come from Slytherin.”
“Because he exists.”
“Don’t make me hex you, Evans!”
But of course Gryffindors are the *good* guys. Right?
Yeah, it was Hagrid who said that “There never was a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t from Slytherin.” A book or two later, Harry’s thoughts noted that “Slytherin was the House that had produced more Dark witches and wizards than any other.” Dude, those statements are not the same. And even if the former were true, not all “bad” magic-doers are “Dark.” Gilderoy Lockhart was a Ravenclaw, and did incalculable damage to the world solely in service to his own greed for fame. Though the Harry Potter Wiki says that his colossal ego was first fueled by his witch mother (his father was a Muggle) who favored him over his Muggle/Squib sisters, so it goes back to belief in wizardly superiority even there.
@41 “lt takes a great deal more bravery to betray your friends than to stand up to your enemies.” -Peter Pettigrew to The Sorting Hat, probably
Oh right, I forgot that Pettigrew was a Gryffindor.
@@@@@ 38 – You are correct that a wizard’s worth and skill are reflections of their study of magic (presumably) and what they do with it, and not with their parents. But your baseball analogy falls short. Essentially every human being possesses the same basic set of tools to play baseball; some people have more athletic ability than others, but its all on the same spectrum. Wizard/witches have an attribute which Muggles simply do not have and cannot artificially cultivate. It would be more apt to say that wizards are like basketball players who can get the ball and fly untouched to the hoop, and Muggles are normal humans. It is not bigoted or racist to state that the magical community is fundamentally different from non-magic users. And the text makes it clear that this difference is such that normal humans are essentially lesser life forms compared to wizards.
As for eugenics… I don’t know. First off, these kinds of arguments are very prevalent in the medical community today, so it’s not as simple as “eugenics – you must be insane”. We’re at a point where we understand more than ever before what leads to illness and disease within our genome. Is it wrong to try minimize those factors? But more importantly… it’s wrong to think of wizards as homo sapiens. They are as far above “normal” humans as we are above ants. Comparing them to Muggles is almost useless. Without any information of how magical ability is passed on we can’t make any judgments, of course. But it seems highly likely that genetics or at least parentage plays a role, and if that is true then it lends a great deal of credibility to pureblood enthusiasts. Racism is evil because it takes skin color and projects all sorts of nonsense about completely unrelated issues onto that. Thinking that someone is stupid because they have dark skin is morally reprehensible. But there are people with dark skin (and light, of course) who genuinely are stupid, and there is nothing racist in pointing that out. People are people. The difference is that magic users inherently have something non-magic users do not. If I’m 5’5″ and you’re 7′, it’s not bigoted to say you’re going to be better at getting things off high shelves. At some point, it shouldn’t be rude or obnoxious to state the obvious. And there isn’t even a comparable example for this, because all people operate on the same basic spectrum for all things. Magic users operate on an entirely different spectrum! They are inherently superior beings.
And by the way, it’s pretty obvious that the attitude of the Wizarding community is one of contemptuous indifference to Muggles, not wary apprehension. They have entire departments of their government devoted to casually wiping out Muggle memories, and “Muggle baiting” is such an issue that they have large scale law enforcement dedicated to stopping it. We hear of Ron Confounding his driving examiner in the epilogue, just so he can have the minor convenience of driving without actually learning how! Not only is that one of Our Heroes abusing a random innocent, its dangerous even after the fact because he’s likely to injure another motorist. And, unfortunately, Muggles don’t get healed up magically after gruesome accidents.
You make some excellent points, although I would disagree with the assessment (made by Rowling, that you worked from) that the only significant change Draco would have made to his lifestyle was a change in beliefs toward Muggles and Muggleborns. The challenge to his worldview was too traumatic, in my estimation, for him to go on living the same life his parents lived. When I suffered similar challenges to my core beliefs, I fundamentally changed my life. I believe Draco would have done the same.
Furthermore, I’d disagree with your assessment that he would “always be in the proverbial doghouse.” Perhaps, if the other characters leave him there to rot. But if they were to embrace him as an ally, he could help them fight their world’s racism in more profound ways than they could imagine. He knows how the enemy thinks. He’s been the enemy. He can tell Harry and others how those beliefs were reinforced in his own life, and by extension, how to fight them in society at large. Post-war Draco had far more potential to be an invaluable resource than the other characters or Rowling ever allowed him to exhibit.
And I think that’s what America needs to fight racism: a willingness to let the enemy change, to let them truly become allies and allow them to use their knowledge to help fight the enemy to which they once belonged. Leaving them in the proverbial doghouse permanently, no matter how difficult their journey to the side of good or the things they do to help fight beliefs they once perpetuated, will only discourage change. When faced with the choice between staying with the oppressors, and going to a side that has made no secret about always viewing you with suspicion, most people would take the path of least resistance. Even those who make the right choice might be cowed into silence, fearful of losing friends when they’ve already cut ties with their old lives. We have to make the choice to switch sides an attractive one.