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If we carry through on the racism/blood prejudice equivalency...
was James Potter a racist of the worst order?
Think back to the Snape's Worst Memory scene. Remember when Lily asks James just what Severus ever did to him? The reply from James was, "it's more the fact that he exists if you know what I mean. . ." Most people, IMO, interpret that to mean the bully's "natural" prey instinct had kicked in, but what if we are going to carry through on the claim that anti-Muggle and Muggleborn prejudice is equivalent to racism.
These boys were born in 1960, and it was not until 1967 that Loving v. Virginia struck down anti-miscegenation laws in the US. Ahhh, you say, stop trying to apply American standards and baggage to Brits. So let's look at Rowling's model: Anti-miscegenation laws were enforced in Nazi Germany. They were also enforced in South Africa between 1949 and 1985. So....was Snape's existence the result of a violation of the law? How many half-bloods did we see in the Marauder era? And even if it's not illegal, was it considered shameful by a large segment of the Wizarding population? No, it wasn't by Harry's time, but mores change. Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed? He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals, always followed up with the tag line: "Not that there's anything wrong with that." (nod, nod, wink, wink). It's also the shrug and eye-roll that accompanies many whites' comments about Native Americans, with the apparent idea that they can imply the most outrageously racist things, and it doesn't count because they trail off towards the end. But their buddies all know what they meant, so they're covered either way.
I can almost hear the howls of outrage. ;-) You idiot, they say, he was married to LILY, the ultimate poster child for Muggle-borns. But...
How many friends did James Potter have who were not pureblood? I mean friends, as opposed to hangers-on or sycophants. We know he was married to Lily, obviously. Which means that he made an exception for his own behavior, not uncommon at all for bigots. And yes, he "befriended" Lupin the werewolf in school. But how much did he do after school, when Lupin was not a dorm-mate and, later, a prefect in a position to choose between admiring them or blowing the whistle on Sirius and him? Rowling said in her interviews post-DH that James was independently wealthy, which allowed James and Sirius not to worry about having jobs, so they could "work" for the Order full-time. Note that she does not include Lupin in James' largesse, which according to her extended to James' wife and Sirius, who just happened to be pure-blooded.
These boys were born in 1960, and it was not until 1967 that Loving v. Virginia struck down anti-miscegenation laws in the US. Ahhh, you say, stop trying to apply American standards and baggage to Brits. So let's look at Rowling's model: Anti-miscegenation laws were enforced in Nazi Germany. They were also enforced in South Africa between 1949 and 1985. So....was Snape's existence the result of a violation of the law? How many half-bloods did we see in the Marauder era? And even if it's not illegal, was it considered shameful by a large segment of the Wizarding population? No, it wasn't by Harry's time, but mores change. Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed? He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals, always followed up with the tag line: "Not that there's anything wrong with that." (nod, nod, wink, wink). It's also the shrug and eye-roll that accompanies many whites' comments about Native Americans, with the apparent idea that they can imply the most outrageously racist things, and it doesn't count because they trail off towards the end. But their buddies all know what they meant, so they're covered either way.
I can almost hear the howls of outrage. ;-) You idiot, they say, he was married to LILY, the ultimate poster child for Muggle-borns. But...
How many friends did James Potter have who were not pureblood? I mean friends, as opposed to hangers-on or sycophants. We know he was married to Lily, obviously. Which means that he made an exception for his own behavior, not uncommon at all for bigots. And yes, he "befriended" Lupin the werewolf in school. But how much did he do after school, when Lupin was not a dorm-mate and, later, a prefect in a position to choose between admiring them or blowing the whistle on Sirius and him? Rowling said in her interviews post-DH that James was independently wealthy, which allowed James and Sirius not to worry about having jobs, so they could "work" for the Order full-time. Note that she does not include Lupin in James' largesse, which according to her extended to James' wife and Sirius, who just happened to be pure-blooded.
Correct and incorrect race/gender configurations
You have a point, probably that's the only thing JKR intended with that scene. Who knows, maybe to her even a mental picture of a wealthy White English boy from a purist family jerking off to a poster for Black P*ssy Quarterly (or whatever those mags are called) doesn't push any squick buttons.
I do find it interesting that Sirius never actually finds a Muggle girlfriend -- or if he has, at some point, we never get to hear him brag about him, never mind see him married to her. As someone mentioned somewhere up the threads, that's the one taboo of the Potterian racial dating field, it seems, that wizards can always marry Muggleborn witches and produce Wonderful Children, while witches marrying true-blue Muggle men are also very prominent in this story since it produced Mr. Evilness Incarnate and Mr. Eternal Misery, and yet somehow we never see any Muggle woman getting a "nasty shock" when she finds out her husband has way more power over her than the physical power she already knew about. I mean, why do we get to learn of Merope raping Tom (which had absolutely zero relevance to Harry's horcrux quest by the way) but we're never given even a hint of a wizard taking advantage of a poor powerless Muggle girl, ever? Is that too ugly for JKR to visualize because it hits too close to home, or -- horror of horrors -- is it really true that "Muggleborn" and "Muggle" should make no difference in her magical world? I.e., is it her message that, when Superior Race Man falls in love with Inferior Race Woman and coerces her into marrying him it's totally natural and there's nothing manipulative about the process, since that's an "equal" couple as couples should be, whereas Superior Race Women lusting after Inferior Race Men are categorically unnatural and wrong, since there will then be a power imbalance, and marriages borne out of such unions are a recipe for marital dysfunction -- wherein somehow the wife still ends up being the one to suffer the most unhappiness, bullied and cowering or despairing, starving and dying?
typo
"we never get to hear him brag about
himher," obviously.)Re: typo
Good gay subtext and disallowed gay subtext
Anyway, yeah, I agree that scene seems a pretty blatant attempt on JKR's part to hetero-wash her "cute and cool" characters. And, see, this is where I can't help but get pissed off at her hypocrisy. I mean, it must have been a pretty desperate need of hers, this need to heterosexualize Sirius, if it made this author who has vocally taken a stance against the sexual objectification of the female body (or is it just the *thin* female body that she doesn't like objectifying? -- oh wait, she doesn't mind if it's *her* body at a podium on Harvard campus!) to plant the imagery of bikini-clad girls "smiling" with "glazed eyes" in the bedroom of her heroic male character. This is a children's book for God's sake, and even if boys and girls have been "snogging" random partners everywhere on screen since OotP, the overall pretense of the series has still been that there is no such thing as sex or sexual bodies for teenagers, and that the only thing that happens between boys and girls are "love," "unidentified belly monster," and "unity between two sets of lips." And yet, she had to have those half-naked ladies on Sirius' wall.
And to consider: This is coming from a woman who blazenly says (in the face of hundreds of Christian fundamentalists who she *knows* are trying to ban her books from school libraries) that she has always thought of Dumbledore as gay, and that her description of the Dumbledore-Grindelwald friendship has been intended as a barely consealed (or not at all consealed) depiction of a homosexual relationship. So she *says* she feels totally cool about her characters being read as subtextually gay. No, she says she even *intends* them that way, when they happen to *be* gay. Which they can be.
Yes, they can be. When the gay love in question (and the only gay potential to ever grace the unkindly character's long, solitary life) is unequivocally the love of an innately good guy falling victim to the allure of an unquestionably evil man (who somehow always happen to be physically beautiful). Yet apparently, the subtextual potential of gayness can absolutely, positively not be permitted when the character is one of the good guys who guides and befriends our hero boy, and has been in a very close textual friendship with his father and another of Harry's good father figures. Why?
Why would that be a problem for JKR, who according to her own claim is the paragon of anti-homophobia, who "doesn't care" if one of her characters just so happens to be gay and thinks it's completely okay for Dumbledore to be both gay and Headmaster of Goodness? Why try to heterosexualize Sirius in such a blatant way when she has not even tried to hide Dumbledore's gayness, when she in fact went out of her way to mention it in a Q/A session where her questioner didn't even mention the issue of sexuality?
And yet there are those who agree with JKR's claim that she's *color-blind* towards sexual diversity, and believe that the one character whose homosexual subtext she has decided against eliminating just *happens* to be a once-burned-and-now-unfriendly eunuch...
Re: Good gay subtext and disallowed gay subtext
It all reeks of a reaction to the criticism she had faced in her tour to that point, and a clear attempt to inoculate herself. So now, if you are a critic and can "prove" you are not a religious nut who thinks she's promoting witchcraft, well then, you must be a homophobe! Don't forget that Rowling has repeatedly admitted to browsing to web to read about herself and the books. And before her big announcement about Dumbles, there was quite a bit of chatter that she was going to be surprised because quite a few non-hyper-religious people were finding lots of reasons to dislike Book 7 other than the tired old "promotes witchcraft" canard. Of course, that all took a nosedive after the announcement, IMO because few people wanted to be accused of anti-gay bigotry.
And in the meantime, she's covered herself by taking the most sexless character available and proclaiming them gay, all the while she has determinedly "rescued" Sirius Black from the slashers. Personally, I'm not gay and I don't care if her characters are. It's the hypocrisy and cold calculation about politics and her book sales that I find so distasteful.
Re: Correct and incorrect race/gender configurations
There's always Arsinoe de Blassenville's analysis in her fiction "The Golden Age", that there are no genetically-Muggle-born witches and wizards: all "Muggleborn" magic kids are bastards born of rape or seduction, and it's the bastardy and potential for involuntary incest that make them "filthy".
Just looking at the power imbalance in James and Lily's marriage rather confirms it: they live in his house, see only his friends, only his best friend is at Harry's christianing and will be their secret-keeper.... The definitiion of a perfect marriage: the man is thoroughly on top, and that's the way she likes it.
As to Sirius, I'm afraid the only way I could imagine him with a Muggle girl is in an Arnold-Schwartzenegger-type orgy: you know, one female off in the corner to prove they're not really gay while the guys all stand around posing at each other. As to whether the girl would have been magically coerced.... Ugh.
Re: Correct and incorrect race/gender configurations
*nods* It gives new meaning to the criticisms that the books are anti-feminst, doesn't it? It's way beyond that.