Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn men.

Heinrich Heine

I have something of a reputation as a voracious reader.  Prior to the invention of the smart phone, I would bring a book with me whenever I thought I would end up waiting for any period of time, be it waiting at the doctor’s office or waiting for a meal to arrive when I am alone at a restaurant.  Now that I have a smart phone, I will sometimes browse the internet instead, but I will just as often stick with a good book.  This tends to garner me many an approving comment in public as it makes me come across as diligent and educated.

This wasn’t always the case.  There was a time where I universally regarded reading as work.  Work that was typically mandated by the public schools I attended.  This wasn’t due to any lack of trying on the part of either the School system or my parents.  My school system tried to pull out all the stops to convince its students to read on their own initiative.  It had the “drop everything and read” program to try and coax students to read in the middle of the day.  There were several programs where students got extra credit for picking a book off of a pre-approved list and reading them at home in their spare time, although this felt more like a penalty for poor grades than anything else.  And of course, there were the mandatory reading assignments given out by the individual teachers.  None of it would take.  I would just power through the material as best as I could so I could move on with my life.

This all changed in high school when a friend of mine leant me his copy of Larry Niven’s Ringworld.  This was a science fiction adventure taking place on the titular ringworld, an artificial ring the diameter of Earth’s orbit constructed around a distant star.  The interior of the ringworld possessed a habitable surface thousands of times that of the Earth and possessed and enormous range of biomes for the protagonist to explore along with numerous sapient species and cultures to encounter.  This novel had me hooked and wanting more after I had completed it.

Unfortunately, Larry Niven wasn’t the most consistent author and Ringworld’s two sequels, The Ringworld Engineers and The Ringworld Throne, weren’t written to the same standard.  The Ringworld Engineers was still enjoyable but The Ringworld Throne was terrible and might have killed my new found enthusiasm for reading if my friend had not stepped in again.  This time he lent me The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov; a murder mystery set in an arcology on a futuristic Earth.  And unlike Ringworld, its sequels were just a good as the original.  And thus, I realized that I did not hate reading, I just hated the selection of books my school system had provided to encourage me to read. 

The books I was required to read for school can be divided into two categories:  the classics, written by historically famous authors and studied as pinnacles of the art of writing; and more causal books that would largely be read for recreation, presumably incorporated into the school curriculum just to get students interested in reading.  Now you might suspect that it was the classics that turned me off from reading, but that was not the case.  The classics were a mixed bag.  Some classic novels I found dreadful, such The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations and Frankenstein along with anything else that involved an abused orphan growing up in Britain.  Others were simply depressing, like just about anything Steinbeck wrote.  But I genuinely enjoyed Greek mythology, including the Odyssey, and in stark contrast to what is normally expected of your average high school student I liked Shakespeare.  Although Shakespeare technically wrote plays, not novels.  The thous and thees of Shakespeare never bothered me, perhaps because I had been playing the Ultima series of RPGs since middle school which used many of the same archaic English terms.  Thou is just a synonym for you, it is not exactly difficult to work around.

I did not get to the classical literature I enjoyed until high school, so it was down to the causal literature to keep me engaged until then.  These were the books that failed me.  They all shared the same setting and premise.  The protagonist was always a child attending a suburban public school where the sort of meaningless drama you would typically associate with primary schools would ensue.  I suppose the underlying assumption with this choice of literature is that being a ward of the public education system I can relate.  And while that may be true, it just creates a bigger problem.  After spending 6 to 8 hours in school and putting up with all the crap associated with school, the last thing I want to when I get home is open up a book and read about somebody else also suffering through meaningless school drama.  School is the absolute last place I want to project my mind into after spending a full day in school.

The irony of the situation is that back when I was of school age, reading was always pitched to me as being able to take me “anywhere that could be imagined.”  It seems that whoever was creating the reading selection for my school must have had a sorely lacking imagination given that only place their imagination could take them was straight back to school.  The young adult and adult literature doesn’t seem to suffer from this problem.  There you can have series like the Dresden Files, where wizard detectives use magic to fight eldritch abominations on parallel planes of existent.  That is what is meant by “anywhere that could be imagined.”  Note that this is not set in a public school that was painted a different color than the one you attended.

It is from this dearth of imagination that one book in particular I read back in elementary school stood out to me.  It too involved a child attending a public school, but with a twist.  The child was given a magic lunchbox as a birthday gift.  The lunchbox would transmute the healthy but unappetizing lunches packed by his mother into unhealthy but vastly more appetizing meals, thus making the child happy if obese.  The conflict is driven by the disappearance of said lunchbox after which the child and his friends go on an adventure to locate both the lunchbox and the thief responsible for its disappearance.  The children ultimately locate both the lunchbox and the thief and live happily ever after, until they all die from type 1 diabetes.  This book proved to be surprisingly popular among the children I went to elementary school with.

It is amazing what the addition of a single extraordinary object can do the liven up the aggressively boring stories about children attending public school that it is simply assumed children will like.  About a decade after I read this book, another author must have come to exactly the same conclusion.  She decided to liven up the child-attends-school genre of books not by introducing a single magical object, but by making the entire school magical.  It’s not just any magical school either, but a school in which instead of learning subjects such as English and geometry, students instead learn magic to become wizards.

And thus was born Harry Potter, a series of books about the titular wizard as he attends the world’s most negligent wizarding school.  Harry Potter starts as an abused English orphan, this being the law or something for books set in England, but soon discovers there is a world of witches and wizards hiding in plain sight among mundane society courtesy of various magical shenanigans.  The wizarding world holds occupational safety standards in universal contempt, meaning that Harry is constantly risking his life participating in sports, serving detention or even entering the wrong hallway of Hogwarts.  But the world is so wonderous and interesting and he can’t help but look forward to each new school year, especially while he is under the abusive care of his stepparents.

The wizarding world wasn’t just wonderous to Harry Potter, millions of children the world over found it equally wonderous and likely a breath of fresh air after having to read the umpteenth book set in a mundane public school.  Switching the setting for an ordinary school to a wizard school created the literary equivalent of crack-cocaine, making J. K. Rowling a billionaire and one of the most widely read and beloved authors in all of human history.  She achieved what my school tried and failed in vain to do, get children to actually read on their own initiative.

Her accomplishments understandably earned considerable praise and she has earned dozens of awards, either directly or through her individual books.  These include being made a Legion of Honor by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, becoming an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburg, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour among other accolades.  These were typically granted either for contributions to literature or for philanthropy, because when you are a billionaire, you tend to have a lot of money and clout to donate to charity.

Fame again proves to be a double-edged sword, as Rowling has attracted no shortage of critics despite the fact that all she is doing is writing books for children to enjoy.  Some of this was expected.  Writing a book in which children learn witchcraft isn’t going to make you friends with most fundamentalist Christians, some of whom have gone as far as burn Harry Potter books and related paraphernalia [2].  But Rowling has crossed more than the usual suspects.

Back in 2019, Rowling made the mistake of standing up for Maya Forstater.  Maya Forstater gained her fame when she sued Centre for Global Development for failure to renew her contract after describing transgender woman as men on social media.  As summarized by The Telegraph [3]:

In March this year, six months after using her personal Twitter account to express the view that “male people are not women”, her employment at the company was not renewed and she was informed that her email account would be closed one week later.

Forstater originally challenged her termination in the Central London Employment Tribunal, which ruled against her on December 19, 2019 stating that the claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others [3].  On the same day, Rowling made the following tweet in support of Forstater [4]:

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.

Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?

#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

Maya Forstater would eventually win her case in after appealing it to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, but in the interim Rowling managed to get herself labeled a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist [5].  A media firestorm managed to erupt over her comments in the space of two days, earning her all manner of condemnation.  If this were her only infraction, perhaps her comments would have been forgotten, but six months later she managed to offend again.  In response to the rather absurdly titled Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate posted on Devex [6], Rowling tweeted [7]:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate

Four days later, she followed up here tweet with a 3600 word essay [9], which opens with a reference to her original tweet in support of Forstater.  According to her account, she had been receiving flak for her views on sex and transgender issues since two years before she defended Forstater.  I find her account of how she initially angered trans particularly telling.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Rowling was merely archiving tweets for the purpose of research and accidentally hit the wrong button on a single occasion.  This was sufficient to see her condemned.  She drew even more ire when she attempted to contact someone who was dying of cancer.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

These seemingly innocuous activities caused some segments of the public to behave reprehensibly toward Rowling.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

It does appear that at least some people are making good on their promise to burn her books in the name of trans rights [10], thus stooping to the same level as the fundamentalist Christians.  Rowling also appears to have been ostracized from the 20^th anniversary of Harry Potter films [11].  But perhaps the most interesting consequence to Rowling’s views on trans issues cannot be found within her essay.  The Harry Potter series as a whole has retroactively become racist, at least in certain circles.  This isn’t limited to Rowling’s new work like Troubled Blood, it appears to apply to all her books going back to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [12-15].  The evidence presented to substantiate this accusation is that major characters are predominantly white, one of the Asian characters possesses an Asian name, and the fact that the house elves appear to enjoy their enslavement (apparently oblivious to the idea this is actually a criticism of racism).

At least some of these accusations appear to predate Rowling’s recently revealed political views, as articles arguing that the Harry Potter series is racist have been appearing in academic literature years prior to Rowling’s twitter drama [17].  This may have been an attitude towards the Harry Potter series that had been lying dormant for years that was merely brought to the surface by contemporary drama.  Whatever the origins of these claims, they are being leveled against a book series whose central theme is that racism in all its forms is terrible.  Those making these accusations are aware of this contradiction, but can only claim that the themes of the books are somehow confused or incomplete.

Now I haven’t read anything written by Rowling since The Deathly Hollows, so for all I know every book Rowling has written since then is just Mein Kampf with half the words replaced with swears.  But I am quite familiar with the original seven books and know from first hand experience that they contain a brilliant thesis against and deconstruction of racism.  This is particular true for The Chamber of Secrets.

Harry Potter doesn’t really begin to explore its major themes until Book 2.  Book 1 is largely setup and world building.  It introduces the setting, central premise and major characters of the series.  There is an entire society of wizards that have been hiding from the rest of contemporary society for centuries for vague reasons.  Harry is actually a wizard, but was left to be raised by his aunt to provide him with a “normal” childhood, his celebrity status apparently being a greater danger to his upbringing than the Dursley’s unrepentant child abuse.  Wizarding society seems to enjoy taking the piss out of the muggles and will place the entrance to their secret train station inside one of the world’s busiest train stations just because they can.  Hogwart’s sorts one quarter of its students into an evil snake themed house for some reason.  And perhaps most importantly, wizarding society holds the concept of basic safety in such utter disdain that if one were to come across an enchanted top hat that decapitates the unwary, nobody would be surprised.

But for Harry, Hogwarts and the wizarding world are a dream, especially when contrasted with his abusive upbringing.  And as the Chosen One, Harry naturally manages to avoid the various permutations of negligent homicide Hogwarts has in store for him.  And thus, Hogwarts is slowly revealed to both Harry and the reader; its magic, its creatures, its dangers and its completely nonsensical team sport. 

Once book 1 is finished with the business of world building, Book 2 is there to expand upon the motives and nature of Lord Voldemort beyond “that guy who murdered Harry’s parents.”  This is where the reader is introduced to the concept of “pure blood”, a weird hang up some wizards have over genealogy.  The premise being that wizards whose lineage is entirely composed of other wizards are somehow superior to those wizards who lack such a lineage.  It even comes with its own banal racial slur. 

The premise behind this idea is demonstrably untrue in universe where the talent of individual wizards has no relation to their lineage.  This is most prominently demonstrated in the case of Hermione, who is one of the best witches of her generation despite being born to two muggle parents.  The exact opposite phenomenon also occurs with squibs, those born to wizards who cannot use magic.  This does beg the question as to what does permit a given individual to use magic as muggles appear to be unable to use it for reasons that have nothing to do with knowledge or training, but this is rather beside the point.

None of this stops the pure blood supremacist turning into genocidal fanatics.   The oldest such supremacist mentioned in the series is Salazar Slytherin of evil snake themed house fame, who didn’t want anyone without pure blood attending the school he helped found.  When the remaining three founders disagree with him on this point, Slytherin did the reasonably thing and hid a giant murderous snake in the castle for the express purpose of murdering the children of future generations.  Said snake was to be awakened by the heir of Slytherin, which raises the question of why the other three founders decided to keep his evil snake themed house around.

Said heir of Slytherin turns out to be none other than Voldemort himself, back when he was attending Hogwarts as a student under the name of Tom Riddle.  To the surprise of no one, wizard Hitler gets sorted into Slytherin and unleashes the murder snake.  And the basilisk is supposed to kill people.  It doesn’t kill anyone in the second book because all of the characters that crossed its path were spared by dumb luck save Hermione, who had been prepared to confront it.  In each case the students met the basilisk’s gaze indirectly, resulting in reversible petrification instead of death.  But the intention of both Voldemort and Slytherin was to kill every one of those students, just like Voldemort had Myrtle killed several decades prior to the events of the book.

This is the first significant thing the reader learns about Voldemort’s motivations after “he wants to murder Harry.”  And what the reader learns about Voldemort is he is willing to commit cold blooded mass murder against children simply for having the wrong ancestry.  And this is something Voldemort is choose to commit to while still a teenager, as the first attack was carried out while he was a student and the rest were carried out by a fragment of his soul bound to a diary that was based on his teenage self.   This puts into focus just how horrible Voldemort’s obsession with blood purity is and gives a general idea of where the book series is headed in terms of themes and conflict.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Voldemort hates his very own father for his impure ancestry.  This implies Voldemort doesn’t meet his own standard for ancestral purity that he is willing to hypocritically kill others for failing to meet.  And as bad as the warped psychology of Voldemort is, the situation surrounding the house elves someone manages to even be worse.  The house elves, also introduced in The Chamber of Secrets, have not only been enslaved but have been conditioned over generations to desire their enslavement reflecting one of the absolute worst aspects of slavery.  And this is all limited to just Book 2, these themes remain throughout to series and a further expanded upon in the remaining books.

At this point you may be thinking “Yea, everybody knows that Voldy & Friends are wizard Nazis,” but tell that to those who insist Rowling and everything she ever wrote is now promoting racism.  The Harry Potter series is the most popular work of literature arguing against racism ever written.  But that still isn’t good enough to protect the series against the accusation of racism because its author holds a single political viewpoint that is deemed forbidden.  This just goes to show how absolutely meaningless the accusation of racism has become in our present day.

Ultimately, the whole situation is tragic as it cast shade on both a fantastic book series and a solid set of arguments against actual racism.  And for what, to get one over Rowling?  What a waste.

If you haven’t read the Harry Potter series, I highly recommend it.  Buy yourself a copy of The Sorcerer’s Stone.  If you have children, gift them a copy.  And don’t let petty drama keep you from a fantastic book series.  If you do have children, a book series like this just might be what they to learn to enjoy reading.

References