This one s got a mean, runty look about him. You get that with dogs. I had Colonel Fubster drown one last year. Ratty little thing it was. Weak. Underbred.
Much like the Malfoys, Marge Dursley seems invested in "pure blood, and like them, she seems to endorse the protection of racial purity via both selective breeding and targeted killing. Such attitudes are so abhorrent that it is tempting to dismiss them as fictional evil that could not exist in our world. But they are, in fact, an allegory for the anti-Semitism and racial ideology of Hitler and the Nazis[8].
The racism of the Nazis and the Death Eaters is easy to identify and poses few moral questions. Contemporary racism, however, is more complicated. To be sure, some racism is still perpetrated by avowed racists (e.g., White supremacists) who strive to promote a racist agenda by intentionally hurting, humiliating, or intimidating non-Whites[9]. But today s racism is often much more subtle, and unfortunately, it is not only perpetrated by those who are evil or who want to hurt others. Good people, even those with the best egalitarian intentions, can and do perpetuate acts of racism, sometimes without even being aware of having done so (Gaertner & Dovidio)[10]. Harry s and Ron s indifference to house-elf rights and the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) is a good example. Although Harry frees Dobby and neither Harry nor Ron engages in explicitly racist behavior, their lack of support for S.P.E.W.[11] can be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of elf inferiority, especially given their propensity for actively confronting perceived injustice.
Unintentional and aversive racism may seem hard to study, but psychologists interested in social cognition and group relations have designed a variety of methods to do just that. Perhaps the best known of these is the Implicit Association Test (IAT)[12] an online test measuring implicit attitudes and stereotypes that was developed by Brian Nosek, Mahzarin Banaji, and Anthony Greenwald in 1998. An implicit stereotype, according to the IAT FAQ, is "a stereotype that is powerful enough to operate without conscious control. For example, if you think that John Walters is more likely to be the name of a famous person than Jane Walters, you might be indirectly expressing a stereotype that associates the category of male (rather than female) with fame-deserving achievementdespite the fact that there is a famous female with this last name (Barbara Walters). This was the finding of one of the first experimental studies of implicit stereotypes, and this tendency was found to be uncorrelated with explicit expressions of sexism or stereotypes (Banaji and Greenwald).
In the race IAT, users are first asked to put positive and negative words, such as "failure, "glorious, "terrific, and "nasty, into categories of "good and "bad by clicking the appropriate key on the keyboard as the words flash on the screen. Then, they are asked to do the same with images of Black and White faces. By having users respond to the prompts as quickly as possible, the test aims to side-step both lack of awareness and cognitive controlthe brief, but significant, time lapse we need to give an "acceptable answer rather than a truly honest one. Consistent with previous studies of implicit attitudes, studies using the race IAT reveal that White respondents tend to show implicit bias against Blacks.
So,
what would happen if there was a blood-status IAT and all the Hogwarts
students were required to take it? Consistent with their explicit
attitudes, Draco and many other Slytherins would show anti-half-blood
bias, but what about Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Research with the IAT
reveals that implicit racial bias among White respondents is present as
early as age six, with ten year olds showing the same magnitude of
pro-White bias as adults (Baron & Banaji). These findings suggest
that Ron, having been socialized in a wizard society in which there is
open racism against half-bloods, probably holds some implicit negative
stereotypes of half-bloods, although his friendship with Hermione
probably mitigates the bias (remember that implicit stereotypes are not
correlated with explicit attitudes). The results are harder to predict
for Harry and Hermione, both of whom were raised by Muggles and have
Muggles in their lineage. However, some IAT studies (e.g., Margie,
Killen, Sinno, and McGlothlin) suggest that although they would show no
bias regarding potential friendships, they would be more likely to
associate transgressors with purebloods. There is little doubt, of
course, that everyone at Hogwarts would show an implicit anti-house-elf
bias, but this topic requires considerable elaboration. I will take that up in the last part of this series.
[1] Racism refers to the belief that
race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a
particular race is superior to others. The emphasis on lineage and
blood status suggests that Muggles and wizards can be treated as racial
groups.
[2] University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin likes to illustrate the permanence of contamination by asking people to first imagine a fly landing in their drink and then consider the possibility of finishing the drink, after the fly is removed.
[3] A 2001 study carried out by the New York Times and published in the book How Race is Lived in America found that 29 percent of Whites and 15 percent of Blacks disapproved of Black-White marriages.
[4] One of the practical problems of racial purity that Rowling does not take up is the issue of deciding who qualifies as a "pure-blood. The term "half-blood suggests that one parent is a Muggle, but it s not clear how a person with three "pure-blood grandparents would be classified. The United States historically solved this problem (and simultaneously discouraged miscegenation) by adopting the "one-drop rule, which held that a person with even one drop of Black blood would be considered Black.
[5] The original foundation for contact theory is Sherif s classic 1954 study on inter-group conflict and cooperation (i.e., the Robber s Cave experiment). The study is available online (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca//Sherif/index.htm).
[6] At the very least, we can be reasonably sure that halfbloods are well represented in each House, as we are told that "Much of the wizarding world is actually in this category (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 7).
[7] Eugenics is the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.
[8] In a July, 2000 interview with the CBC, Rowling said, "In the second book, Chamber of Secrets, in fact he [Voldemort] is exactly what I ve said before. He takes what he perceives to be a defect in himself, in other words the non-purity of his blood, and he projects it onto others. It s like Hitler and the Aryan ideal, to which he [Hitler] did not conform at all, himself. And so Voldemort is doing this also. He takes his own inferiority, and turns it back on other people and attempts to exterminate in them what he hates in himself.
[9] Many race scholars and anti-racism activists argue that racism (as opposed to prejudice), by definition, can only be perpetrated in the context of considerable institutional power. According to this definition, people of color in both the United States and Europe can be prejudiced and can commit hate crimes, but they cannot be racist.
[10] Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured this tendency in his 1864 Notes from the Underground, observing that "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
[11] S.P.E.W. is formed by Hermione after she researched the history of elf enslavement (it goes back centuries), with the initial goal of obtaining fair wages and working conditions and the long-term goal of getting elf representation in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Both Harry and Ron join, but they do so reluctantly and clearly only as a favor to Hermione. Neither they, nor any of their classmates, are actually interested in acting on behalf of elf rights. Ron seems to speak for almost everyone at Hogwarts, including Harry, when he says, "Hermione open your ears. . . . They. Like. It. They like being enslaved! (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 224). In Ron s and Harry s defense, the house-elves do, in fact, often act (and talk) as though they prefer servitude to freedom, but in the real world, there has never been a group of people that liked being enslaved (although slaveholders in the United States certainly made that argument) and in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it finally becomes evident that Hermione s concerns for elfish welfare were well founded.
[12] The race IAT (as well as age, sex, and other versions) and associated data can be found at https://implicit.harvard.edu/.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
