“Yes, we have been given power and yes, that power gives us the right to rule”

Unless you’re one of those grown-ass adults who still bursts into tears when someone guesses your Hogwarts house wrong, nobody is denying that we question as adults the value systems we are taught as children. It’s normal to learn different life lessons in the real world than you would in the playground, the classroom, the Quidditch pitch. Sooner or later most of us who grew up reading Harry Potter were bound to develop a more complex worldview than those books could give us, fearing as we do the prospect of those other dingbats being left in charge of anything too important. Surely even JK Rowling would wish better for us than a world where the Huffington Post astrology section runs governments.

Even so, nobody deserves to have their childhood mythology stripped of its moral architecture in such a degrading way as our generation’s: the same author whose books taught us the meaning of courage and tolerance is now publicly behaving in patterns of cowardice and bigotry. If you gaze long into the abyss of JK Rowling’s political instincts, Cornelius Fudge will gaze back into you.

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as a belief system to which JK Rowling holds true, it must be found in the wreckage of empires past and present — ultimately just a different type of void, alas, but one that has at least discernibly structured .

Whatever weird justification Jo might give herself in private for the sordid transfiguration of her public persona, author and academic Sunny Singh suggests us mere muggles can nevertheless locate the anciens régimes guiding Rowling’s cruelty within the silence of her behavioural patterns, rather than the noise of her proclamations. In a Twitter thread that identifies the mechanism by which JK Rowling keeps accidentally(?) making the canon more racist, Singh wrote:

“The big silence at the heart of Harry Potter is about the Empire. Becomes obvious as she expands her storyworld. That silence lets her recreate a sort of fuzzy liberal (Blairite) Harry Potter storyworld based on a British history w/out Empire+slavery. So unsurprising that as Rowling tries to expand that storyworld to US, her silence about the Empire grows ear-shatteringly deafening.”

Unlike the farcical eternity of Rowling’s Wile E. Coyote-esque retcon blunders, Singh’s “big silence” metric here actually succeeds in diagnosing the colonial ghost in the machine, no matter how far back in the canon you go (like some sort of anti-imperialist time-turner). Peering into the big silence as Singh suggests helps locate points in the canon where Rowling, Blair, and the Empire can all be found relieving themselves in the same corridor, at the same time.

It chimes, for instance, with the multiple layers of history which exist simultaneously in Rachel Rostad’s 2013 viral poem about the oriental fetishism that created Cho Chang:

“Madam Butterfly. Japanese woman falls in love with a white soldier, is abandoned, kills herself. Miss Saigon. Vietnamese woman falls in love with a white soldier, is abandoned, kills herself. Memoirs Of A Geisha. Lucy Liu in leather. Schoolgirl porn.”

Similarly, the canon presents Hermione’s house elf activism as incoherent but twee, with the text poking fun at the clumsily pushy manner of her campaigning and the apparent incoherence of her goals. But reevaluating S.P.E.W. as a moment of nothing-to-see-here imperial static reveals a markedly neat internal logic. It threads the goodness of empire (all the house elves except Dobby love their slavery) through the crumbs-from-the-table nannying of Blairite (knitted jumpers for all and remuneration of freed slaves must never ever be discussed).

The original S.P.E.W. canon wasn’t quite fucked up enough yet for Rowling’s tastes, though, with Pottermore once again proudly making everything a bit worse by publishing the quintessential coup de grace of masturbatory centrism: a ‘both sides’ debate about slavery!

Inside and outside of her work, Rowling’s brand of white feminism (something Hermione herself discarded eventually) is even lazier and more self-congratulatory than your average New Statesman columnist, so it makes perfect sense in Hogwarts’s messily camouflaged shambles of colonial erasure.

Enslaved elves at Hogwarts perform their domestic labour out of sight (spells transport food to the Great Hall), which helpfully separates them a little further from the African slaves that Britain’s shining meritocracy must never speak of. A hierarchy of such labour is established by the contrast between those elves and the witches of this universe, where meals can be conjured up with a wand and yet the books and films consistently have women waving wands in the kitchen to feed their families. Such an avoidable socio-cultural eyesore ought to have occurred to Jo as completely nonsensical, both magically (thus artistically) and in regards to her supposed commitment to women’s liberation in real life.

Once again the discrepancies only make sense as colonial: white feminism isn’t about liberating all women, it’s about hierarchies favouring the ‘right’ kind of women and throwing to the wolves anyone who fails to fit that mould. If JK Rowling’s bottomless cruelty truly lacked an internally consistent value system, how would she find it this easy to hate trans people while still making a profit (of course) abusing them in her lacklustre detective novels?

White feminism prioritises the wealthy woman’s individual ‘girl power’ over the safety and dignity of women abused by men in her inner circle. It burgles non-European cultures while dismissing their needs. It pinkwashes itself with shallow tokenism of (cisgender, white, middle class) gay men at the expense of the rest of the LGBTQ community. It applies lipstick to the imperial pig. Crucially, white feminism is one of the most well-known traits of New Labour ideology in practice.

No, despite our heartbroken disappointment at a once-beloved childhood hero, it is simply not accurate to say that JK Rowling is a traitor to her original cause — she is its greatest champion.

Could there ever have been a happier outcome? Could the books’ blind spots have at one time been simply left to wither away as honest mistakes of their time? Is there an alternate universe where a prescient auror casts reductio! on Tony Blair’s war boner? That last one is definitely the most likely, of course, but we will never know.

All we need to know about Joanne Rowling is what she taught us when we were children: “you can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no…anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever.”

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Image credit: @cerejota