I suppose admitting that I'm a HUGE Harry Potter fan places me somewhere down the food chain of intellectualism. But I can live with that because I enjoyed the books that much. I don't know that I ever would have ventured into the series, except that I read the first one on a fluke while enjoying a beach vacation...and I was hooked.
As far as I'm concerned, there are many reasons to admire this work from J. K. Rowling - not the least of which is that it has inspired so many young people to read again. But the themes that she explored also touched both my "inner child" and the adult I have become.
Even if you've not read the books or seen the movies, it will probably come as no surprise that these themes encompass a coming-of-age story as well as an epic battle between good and evil. But did you know that the battle between good and evil is actually based on a fight against racism and oppression? Well, its true.
With the recent premier of the 6th film based on the book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we see that the theme is even incorporated in the title.
As Colleen O'Brien wrote 5 years ago at the release of the book:
Today, as millions of people rifle through freshly minted copies of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to discover the identity of this mysterious new character, I can't help but imagine this prince as biracial rather than "half-magic."
Under the erroneous impression that J.K. Rowling's latest installation included a "half-breed prince," I first balked at the title.
"Half-breed" — akin to mongrel, mutt or half-caste — flies around as a jab at biracial people more often than "half-blood."<...>
In J.K. Rowling's world, half-blood means "half magic." But the term — reflecting a dichotomy between magic/powerful and mundane/helpless — implies a hierarchy. This "magic" hierarchy directly resembles racial hierarchies.
In the story, the world of wizards has been bound up in a battle between those who believe that the "purity" of wizard blood should be protected from mingling with muggles (those or us mortals without wizarding powers) and those who are comfortable with the plurality. While this theme of magical hierarchies has been present since the beginning of the series, it is finally in this 6th installment that we learn more about the villain Voldemort's childhood and begin to understand the roots of the current battle.
Considering the attention Rowling devotes to this theme in books two through five, it should have come as no surprise that she entitled the sixth installment in her series Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In Book Six, Rowling turns to a more personal investigation of racism: the question of what makes an individual persecutor racist. By delving more deeply into the family background of Tom Marvolo Riddle (aka, Voldermort), Rowling raises the question of whether loathing of others is rooted in loathing of oneself. Riddle, it turns out, is the illegitimate son of a Muggle nobleman (Tom Riddle) and a pureblooded witch (Merope Gaunt), and, as a boy, he was disowned by his well-connected father, who feared family shame and loss of social standing. Riddle's maternal grandfather, Marvolo Gaunt, is the sort of man who greets a Ministry of Magic official with the question, "Are you pure-blood?" And when he learns that his daughter is infatuated with the Muggle Tom Riddle, he explodes, articulating his supremacist stance: "My daughter — pure-blooded descendant of Salazar Slytherin — hankering after a filthy, dirt-veined Muggle? . . . You disgusting little Squib, you filthy little blood traitor!"
So we see that the evil wizard who is Harry Potter's biggest foe was met, at the moment of his conception, with rejection based on classism and racism. As a result, he is abandoned as a child to poverty and is eventually raised in an orphanage.
Of course we also know that Harry is an orphan. And in many places during the series he struggles with his similarities with Voldermort and questions his own capacity for evil. These are moments where Rowling takes to reader/viewer deep into the possibilities we all face in life.
While many children who read these novels and watch the movies might not be able to articulate this kind of analysis - the story as mythology is still at work, helping them begin to understand the roots of this kind of hatred in our society.
These personal and social struggles around racism and oppression are played out in almost every character in the series. Harry's best friend Ron comes from a family who is accused of being "muggle-lovers" because of their interest in and comfort with the non-wizarding world. Hermoine is a muggle herself and wears her discomfort with that on her sleeve as she is taunted regularly about it by other students. Perhaps this is why she is the first to react so strongly to the characters known as "house elves" who basically symbolize a kind of slavery in the wizarding world.
We could to on and on with the myriad ways this theme is woven into every aspect of the series. It's clear Rowling is trying to make a point. Here's how she addressed it:
All in all, it seems that Rowling is making a commentary on racism and bigotry in society in her books. When asked why, she replies, “Because bigotry is probably the thing I detest most. All forms of intolerance, the whole idea of ‘that which is different from me is necessary evil.’ I really like to explore the idea that difference is equal and good."
As her title character struggles with his own battles to avoid this evil, Rowling also provides a theme for redemption.
Because Rowling constructs a universe in which the notion of adequacy is predicated upon a person's (and that person's ancestors') ability to do magic, the prejudice in her work takes on a generic or hypothetical quality. It might be racism, but it might also be any of scores of other prejudices. Its root is in making socially constructed value judgments about human beings based on qualities that are inherent, and Rowling, largely through the character of Albus Dumbledore, repeatedly rejects this thinking. After Harry has defeated Voldemort and the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, his headmaster strikes a chord for human autonomy over inherency, telling him, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we really are, far more than our abilities". And when Dumbledore suggests in Goblet of Fire that Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge send envoys to the giants and Fudge objects, citing the common prejudice against giants, Dumbledore retorts, "You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they [sic] grow to be!" Thus, the concept of blood or race (e.g., the wizarding race) in the novel is part of a more fundamental question of human existence that applies to every human: what matters more, who one is or what one does ?