#Harry Potter and the Representation I Didn’t Actually Bother to Write But Still Want Credit For
I love Jo and I love Harry Potter but this is getting stupid.
tbh, this particular one, when taken in context, reads less like “let me talk about the one Jew at Hogwarts!” and more like “yes, duh, there were Jewish students at Hogwarts, are you silly?”
(I wrote that as stewdents about ten times)
The complete set of tweets is here. Basically, instead of saying, “Yes, there are [religion here] at Hogwarts,” she wrote “the only religion I didn’t imagine at Hogwarts was Wicca because the two systems of magic seemed like they would be in conflict.”
The “announcement” in question was in response to another tweet, where someone said “my wife said that Jews couldn’t go to Hogwarts,” to which JKR responded, “Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.” I might be reading it wrong, but it reads to me more like “tell your wife to blow it out her rear” than “and I would like to formally announce that diversity did exist at Hogwarts.”
Later she clarified that Anthony Goldstein is not the first nor only Jewish wizard at Hogwarts, but she knows more about him than the others, likely because he’s a member of Dumbledore’s Army and a bigger part of the story. She also said that Hogwarts is LGBT friendly, all in response to specific questions asked by fans.
While I don’t think that JKR deserves any backpats in terms of representation (which I think of more in terms of microaggression on her part than intentional slight—a product of not thinking about things too deeply because she’d never had to rather than a product of thinking about things deeply and then saying “but fuck it! It’s my story!”), I also think that headlines like this are unfair to her. None of these things were really “announcements” so much as just off-the-cuff tweets in response to questions she was being asked. I might be reading them wrong, but they come across less as “give me diversity brownie points” and more as “here are some things I envisioned in this world but never bothered to write about for whatever reason.”
But like I said, I may be reading things wrong.