Snapedom

To use a different example of real-world racism that mirrors the issue of *descent,* consider this.

Some real-world racists claim black people are less human than white people because they are closer to being monkeys. (Obviously this is a truly vile thing to say or think.) We know from modern science that human beings' ancestors descended from primates.

We don't know if modern wizards' distant ancestors evolved the ability to do magic (that is, a gene mutation bred true) and separated themselves from the rest of humanity in this regard, or got it through interbreeding with other species, or what have you. We do know that magic tends to breed true, and therefore pureblood status can be acquired over time by intermarriage between Muggleborns and their descendants, and other wizards. This supports the possibility that all wizards descend from some mutation back in the distant past, however.

In some ways the attitude of pureblood supremacists towards Muggleborns as hardly better than the Muggles they descend from (or even no different than those Muggles, just with stolen magic) echoes that of those people who think black people are hardly better than the chimpanzees we all descend from. Blood purists do indeed regard Muggles as less human than themselves.

However, the analogy is again disturbing when it comes to Muggles:

blood purists = white racists
Muggleborns = black people
Muggles = monkeys

To take this as a good analogy of blood prejudice in the WW as being like real-world racism is in itself offensive and racist because it implies that, just as Muggleborns are sudden magical sports arising from fully-Muggle unions, so black people would be the equivalent of sudden human sports arising from the breeding of two monkeys. Obviously that is a vile notion.

The fact that attempts to draw direct parallels between actual examples of real-world racism with the prejudice against Muggleborns tends to produce such offensive nonsense as the examples above give demonstrates, I think, another way in which the analogy is flawed in certain respects. If it weren't flawed I ought not to be able to find examples of real-world racism that produce this sort of ugliness when compared with Muggleborn prejudice - the one ought to map cleanly onto the other.

Claiming that prejudice against Muggleborns is racist *because they are wizards, like purebloods* buys into the purebloods' own bigoted notion that Muggles are inferior to wizards. THAT is a closer analogy to real-world racism than anti-Muggleborn prejudice, although it still gets icky due to the mapping of race, ableism and talent onto the same metaphor as raisin_gal describes.

And now I'm getting tired of discussing this.

TL;DR: anti-Muggleborn prejudice (blood prejudice) is similar to real-world racism in key respects. In other respects it is different, and these differences produce icky results when subsumed under the notion of racism. Particularly the equation of wizardkind and humankind.


Coda, to sailorlum: wealth and magic are not the same type of privilege. One is theoretically available to all, in the right circumstance; nothing in one's biological makeup precludes it. The other is a privilege only from the perspective of *openly practicing* magic. It is not a privilege from the POV of biology, since the *ability* to do magic is what distinguishes a wizard from a Muggle. Otherwise 9-year-old Harry was not a wizard any more than Marge was, yet we know he was one. A wizard may have their wand snapped but they do not then become *a Muggle.* The comparison with Jews is inaccurate in that respect.