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Slytherin House is, of course, the bastion of “those whose blood is purest”… right? Only purebloods need apply, and if anyone else ever sorted there by accident (like those notorious alumni Tommy and Sevvie) they keep their secret “dirty” heritage a, well, secret. Right?
Well, maybe in Salazar’s day. But now? Not only does the house necessarily contain non-purebloods—it’s entirely possible that purebloods may even not be in the majority any more.
At least according to what JKR has told us, and a very little basic math.
Part I: Are (Almost) All Slytherins Purebloods?
Consider: JKR apparently said in interviews that purebloods make up about a quarter of the Hogwarts students (and magical population), Muggleborns another quarter, and people of mixed ancestry the rest. Mind, the text actually suggests that the number of “true” purebloods may be a much smaller minority than that—c.f. Ron in CoS explaining to Hermione that Draco’s pureblood supremacist views make no sense because hardly anyone is actually “pure” any more, and Hermione’s observation in GoF that Voldemort’s supporters (all several dozen of them, as it transpires) could not be comprised exclusively of purebloods because there aren’t enough of them. But we’ll take that figure of 25% as a theoretical maximum and see what happens.
(See, by the way, Jodel’s essay “The Rise of the Mudbloods” for a very in-depth discussion of wizard population dynamics. I’m just looking at the ramifications for one house, Slytherin; Madam RedHen looked at wizard society in general. http://www.redhen-publications.com/Mudb
Hogwarts is divided into four houses. Either each contains approximately one-fourth of the student population, or some houses must contain markedly more or fewer students than the others. Yet we have no evidence at all for the latter being the case. No house table in the great hall is noted as being sparsely occupied or overcrowded, nor are we told that the core subjects’ class size varies wildly according to which house our POV Gryffindors share a particular class with. So let’s provisionally assume the houses are approximately equal in size.
So, in Harry’s class there are supposedly about 40 students, about 10 in each house, 28 of whom are named or described. And supposedly about one-fourth of them should be purebloods. Let’s say a normal range of 8-12 (10 +/- 20%).
But Neville, Ron, Ernie, and a Ravenclaw girl, Morag MacDougall, are stated to be purebloods. That leaves 4-8 purebloods to fill Slytherin House’s ten slots. So already Slytherin cannot be pureblood-only.
But it gets worse. Seven non-Slytherin students in Harry’s year are identified as half-bloods, three (only!) as Muggleborns (two if one excludes Dean Thomas), and seven others as either pure or mixed (Wizarding relatives are mentioned, and/or we know that they attend Hogwarts under the D.E. occupation). If even a third of those not-sures are purebloods, that leaves us 2-6 purebloods left to be in Slytherin. If half of the not-sures are, that leaves us 0-4.
It is, in fact, entirely possible that Draco, Millicent, and Vincent (whose surnames we find on the Black Family Tree) are the only pureblood Slytherins in their year. It’s even possible—remotely—that Draco is the only Slytherin pureblood; he is, after all, the only one we know for certain. Canon doesn’t contradict that reading, and statistics allow it.
Nor does the problem go away when we look at other years. We know that house affiliation often runs in families. So the Lovegoods may have been sorting to Ravenclaw for a while, the Prewetts scurrying along with the Longbottoms, Potters and Weasleys into Gryffindor, the Diggorys proud Hufflepuffs of long standing—see where this is heading? We know of all these pureblood families sending their children to houses other than Slytherin. But any pureblood not in Slytherin means a space in Slytherin that must be filled by a non-pureblood, if the house is to be kept in balance with the rest of Hogwarts.
In fact, look at the fifteen families whose blood was pure enough to mix with Blacks according what’s been published of the Black Family Tree. Compare those names to known students in the last two generations (Harry’s and his father’s). We find six names attached to Slytherins: Flint, Bulstrode, Crabbe, Rosier, Lestrange, and Malfoy. We find three Gryffindor families, a probable Gryffindor, & a Hufflepuff: Longbottom, Potter, Weasley, Prewett, and MacMillan. We have three with no students identified in the last two generations: Yaxley, Gamp and Burke. And we have one whose house affiliation was never stated: Crouch.
(Do it the other way and look at members of the original OotP known to be purebloods: Gideon & Fabian, Frank & Alice, James & Sirius. If we assume that all Purebloods not STATED to have sorted elsewhere were Slytherins, we’d have at least four Slytherins [besides Severus, who’s undercover] in the original Order. Shouldn’t Hagrid have mentioned that to Harry? Alternatively, if we hold to the impression that Order members were mostly Gryffs, and consider that the Prewetts’ nephews and Longbottoms’ son are Gryffs, we’d have at least 6 Gryff Purebloods in the generation before this one.)
Just on names, we have for this sample (the Blacks’ marital connections) at BEST 73% of pureblood families tending to sort to Slytherin; at worst, it may be as low as 46%. So either Slytherin House is becoming smaller and smaller, or it contains between, say, 27% to 54% Half-bloods and Muggleborns.
If you look at the Black family’s possible pureblood relatives and marital connections only in the most recent generation, Harry’s, it looks even worse: we know of one each Flint, Bulstrode, Crabbe, and Malfoy in Slytherin (four), versus seven Weasleys, a Longbottom, and a MacMillan (nine in other houses).
So if Slytherin House makes up even close to a quarter of the Hogwarts population, and if purebloods do make up a quarter of the Wizarding population, purebloods are probably either already a minority or in imminent danger of slipping into a minority in their “own” house.
Just for grins, let’s try the numbers to see how much smaller Slytherin house would be by now if it were accepting only purebloods and the vanishingly rare exceptionally talented half-blood (say, one per generation or two… Tom Riddle, Severus Snape). Let’s take the 46-73% range for purebloods choosing to sort into Slytherin, and further assume that the other three houses (not being prejudiced about who they accept) are roughly equal. If 3/4 of purebloods sort to Slytherin (and in effect almost no one else does or can), Slytherin house would gain about 18% of incoming students, with the remaining 82% being roughly evenly dispersed among the other three houses (about 27% each). In Harry’s class (of 40), that would be about 7 Slytherins, with about 11children in each other house.
In other words, if just one-quarter of purebloods sorted to other houses and Slytherin accepted (almost) no one else, Slytherin would have about two-thirds the students of other houses.
If it’s more like 54% of purebloods who choose other houses, that would leave Slytherin with about 11-12% of total students, and each other house at close to 30%. In other words, each of the other houses would now outnumber Slytherin by very nearly 3:1.
And Slytherin House still managed to win the Quidditch and House Cups for years, until Harry arrived to throw things off? Now THAT is a tribute to the power of ambition! And to Harry’s powers of obliviousness (okay, Harry’s obtuseness at least IS canon) —Slytherin house holds only one-third to two-thirds of the students in Gryffindor, and Harry never once notices, if only to think spitefully, “Well, it makes sense that no one would ever sort there if they could go elsewhere!”
But I think it’s more reasonable to assume that Slytherin House, whatever Salazar’s stated preferences, has for a while now been accepting ambitious mixed-bloods and Muggleborns without all that much of a fuss.
*
Part II: Possible Changes in Attitudes to Blood “Superiority” Over Time
Please note that Draco Pureblood Malfoy never once used the opprobrious epithet ‘Mudblood’ of Hermione (or anyone) until after SHE had mortally insulted HIM by asserting that Malfoy could never have made his house’s Quidditch team without cheating. (Maybe Hermione had been channeling Trelawney in this scene—and how Hermione would have hated that!—and projected forward to HBP, when only cheating—hers—could get someone on the team. In my grade school, we used to sing to someone who’d accused another of transgressing schoolyard codes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, what you say is what you are.”)
Before Draco entered Hogwarts, he had an encounter with a kid dressed in Muggle cast-offs—and he tried, repeatedly, to strike up a conversation with him. Only after the presumed Muggle-born had rudely snubbed his every conversational overture did Draco start asking about Harry’s family and pontificating about how Hogwarts shouldn’t let “the other sort” in. (Thanks, duj, for having pointed this out.)
IOW: Draco didn’t start with Pureblood supremacist rantings the moment he met his first (if illusory) Muggle-born. He turned to that after being snubbed by the supposed Muggle-born, perhaps to protect himself from being hurt by Harry’s rejection, perhaps to hit back.
And he didn’t talk about blood purity; he talked about the outsiders “not knowing our ways.”—which Harry had, in fact, just been demonstrating.
At the beginning of CoS when Lucius criticized Draco’s grades, Draco protested “the teachers all have favorites, that Hermione Granger—”
It’s his father who pointed out that Hermione was “a girl of no wizard family” who nonetheless beat Draco “in every exam.” (Um—every exam? So that would include Potions? Then Snape did grade fairly on his finals, as some of us had otherwise surmised? And, er, no one else, apparently, beat Draco’s exam scores? Oh, how he must have hated Hermione--not for her blood status, but as his only serious academic rival. And notice that neither father nor son, speaking privately, attached opprobrious epithets to the despiséd Hermione.)
And Mr. Borgin, listening in, inserted (greasily, per JKR), “It’s the same all over. Wizard blood is counting for less everywhere—”
Let’s get this straight, because subtle differences matter. The “stooping” Mr. Borgin (who may therefore have been older, of an earlier pureblood generation) implied strongly that “wizard blood” ought to “count” to get Draco the better grade, regardless of whether Draco’s performance had actually merited it.
Lucius Malfoy, in contrast, argued explicitly that his pureblood son ought to be able to EARN a higher grade than “a girl of no wizard family.”
And Draco protested (unconvincingly, in my view) that Muggle-born Hermione’s higher grade was earned by being a teacher’s pet, and thus (implicitly) that truly fair grading would have put Draco first.
Let’s review Draco’s logic. A scion of the Slytherin pureblood filthy-wealthy elite finds it plausible (in 1992) to assert that he’s the put-upon victim of unfair grading at Hogwarts? That Dumbledore’s teachers (including Snape?) would unjustly grade a Muggle-born Gryffindor higher than a rich pureblood Slytherin?
Oh, my.
Not that I accept Draco’s excuse, but that Draco could offer that argument to his father and expect to be believed casts a FASCINATING light on the Hogwarts subculture.
*
Part III: Is “Blood Purity,” in itself, the Only/Primary Source of Status in Slytherin House?
Clearly, being ‘well-born’ (pure) is a POSSIBLE source of status in Slytherin house, as in the WW in general. But the only one? Or even necessarily the overriding one? As a source of status, after all, it’s competing with wealth, fame, connections to the political power elite, raw magical talent, intelligence, even beauty… with NONE of which is it directly correlated by now.
We saw that Draco combined pure birth, wealth, connection to the power elite, intelligence, magical power, and a creative talent for adolescent mocking humor. We know that at least some of the other Slytherins in his year followed his lead. But we also know that when his family lost status, he lost influence: Slughorn shunned him as a DE’s son in HBP, Crabbe ended up rejecting him in DH as a failed DE’s son/ DE. His purity of blood hadn’t changed, but his (changing) family status apparently trumped that. On both (on all?) sides.
And remember that canon showed us that Draco pulled the “Mudblood” card on Hermione only after she had both bested him academically and viciously insulted him.
It’s quite possible that only those who came up short in every other possible arena would automatically totally privilege pureblood birth over all other considerations (*cough* Marvolo Gaunt).
On the other hand, there’s the underlying blood prejudice that Slughorn so innocently expressed to Harry, that surely, people of magical birth MUST (in general) be more adept at magic. But though Sluggy thought Lily’s and Hermione’s brilliance unusual, he was not at all surprised by half-blood Harry’s proficiency in Potions. More to the point, Sluggy specifically and repeatedly attributed Harry’s talent to LILY’s blood running in Harry’s veins, not to the thousand-year-pure Potter blood with which Lily’s was mixed. So Slughorn, at least, seems to think that ANY magical inheritance is sufficient to account for magical greatness; he doesn’t think that “purity” is necessary. (Note this was also Hagrid’s view—he told Harry that of course Harry would be a thumpin’ great wizard, with the parents he had. Hagrid did NOT say that of course Harry would be great as the last scion of the Potters, despite his father’s unfortunate misalliance.) So the prejudice in the general population seems to be more that it’s astonishing that magical brilliance could emerge out of nothing, not (among any but the loony fringe like Walburga and Marvolo), that purity of blood is required for magical power.
And indeed, in areas of Muggle mastery we Muggles generally think the same. We’re more astonished if an Olympic athlete is the child of dedicated couch-potatoes than a trained-from-birth scion of top athletes; and at my (top-ranked, private, expensive) college there were far fewer first-generation scholars than children of the professionally-educated classes. And, um, we first-generationers felt ourselves at a bit of a disadvantage compared to those for whom higher education was an obvious birthright….
Moreover, Sluggy at least allowed that the rule, magical birth is a prerequisite for magical greatness, could be disproved in any specific case. A given Muggleborn, such as Lily or Hermione or Dirk Cresswell, could win personal acceptance without necessarily dislodging the overall belief.
What’s the saying?
“A Muggleborn has to do something twice as well as a pureblood in order to be thought half as good.
Fortunately, that’s not difficult.”
But that you had to be “pure” to win acclaim…. there’s no more evidence (that I know of) that that’s true in general in Slytherin, than that it’s true in the WW in general. That is, there is evidence that (some) people value blood purity, and that some (mostly losers) value it highly. But the most-honored person in Wizarding Britain when we readers entered it was Dumbledore the Half-blood. Who had been contested by (and defeated) Riddle the secret Half-blood, that promoter of Pureblood supremacy.
*
Part IV: Mortal Insults versus Insults between Friends
Blood status was not the only type of “superiority” that we saw deployed against enemies, but not against (supposed) friends and allies.
Note how the indisputably-wealthy Malfoys and Blacks used their superior economic status to insult their less well-off enemies. Lucius insulted Arthur for his poverty; his son regularly taunted Ron and the other Weasleys about being poor, starting from the moment Draco identified the strange redhead on the Hogwarts Express as an enemy Weasley. In PoA Draco jeered at Lupin, whom he didn’t like, for shabby robes. And Draco called Hagrid (excuse me, Professor Hagrid—though he wasn’t then) a servant, disparagingly.
Yet Severus Snape lived in a Muggle slum, in a moldering tiny house with shabby furnishings—and Narcissa Malfoys knew exactly where to find him, so his domicile (and what it revealed about Snape’s background) had presumably not been a secret from the Malfoys. Though Bellatrix denigrated his home, Narcissa did not—nor did we ever see Lucius or Draco do so, even when Draco was fighting with Snape in HBP. Nor do we have any reason to think that Vincent or Gregory’s families commanded anything like the Malfoy fortune, yet we never saw Draco attempt to hold their comparative poverty against them.
Similarly, we never saw Sirius Black hold Remus’s poverty against him. But Black did call Severus Lucius’s lapdog, insinuating (among other things) that Snape was a hanger-on rather than a true friend of the wealthy Malfoys.
It seems that economic disadvantage can be used as a weapon—and that such weapons are to be used against enemies, not against allies or friends.
So is blood status the same in the WW? Something a “superior” MIGHT use (as one might use superior economic status) to taunt an enemy, but that one would never invoke against an ally/friend?
Bellatrix clearly disparaged both Snape’s economic status and his genetic heritage when she characterized his home as being situated in “a Muggle dung heap.” Yet Narcissa, equally bred of the Blacks and married to the Malfoy millions, didn’t encourage Bella’s criticism.
And which of the women, again, was visiting Severus to ask him for a favor?
Yet not even Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Voldemort’s right hand (she wished!), criticized Snape’s half-blood birth or relative poverty to his face, though we know she inherited her aunt Walpurga’s mania on the subject of blood purity. Instead, she focused on his supposed failures to achieve their Lord’s ends.
There are insults one doesn’t voice, at least not aloud to one’s allies’ faces.
Bellatrix and Severus were, after all, allies in devoted service to one Lord.
*
Part V: Is the House of Ambition Currently the “Best” House?
A few other unsupported misconceptions about Slytherins and/or purebloods—are Slytherins in general, purebloods in general, or specifically Slytherin purebloods all (or mostly) members of a politically powerful and fabulously wealthy elite?
Well. Pureblood families described in canon as rich include the Malfoys, Blacks, Lestranges (all Slytherin) and the Potters (Gryffindor). The Crouches (house unknown) certainly had not been hurting for money, and Hufflepuff’s heiress Smith had been fabulously wealthy back in the forties. Zacharias is said to be a half-blood, so if he’s her relative the family, like the Potter family, is no longer entirely “pure.” The Gaunts emphatically were not wealthy, nor are the current Weasleys or the Lovegoods. The Longbottoms don’t seem to be, though their reluctance to spend money on top-quality gear for Neville may reflect their opinion of the near-Squib more than their financial standing. Slytherin Blaise Zabini’s mother is wealthy through her deceased husbands—none of whose blood status is known, nor is her own or her son’s. Nor, in fact, is the former Mrs. Zabini’s house, nor the houses of any of her husbands.
Do we have canon evidence for the financial status of any other pureblood family now, or for any other Slytherin of whatever blood status?
Well, Slytherins Tom and Severus entered Hogwarts penniless. And who, after all, is more likely to be ambitious, someone born with a silver spoon in hir mouth or someone who has to scrabble for everything?
There’s no direct evidence for anyone else (that I recall). But… remember Draco’s second year, when Lucius bought the entire Slytherin Quidditch team Nimbus 2001 brooms to celebrate his son’s making the team (or, per Hermione, to bribe the team to accept his son)? That gesture makes no sense unless most of the team had previously, like the Weasley twins, been riding inferior brooms. If all or most of the team already had their own top-of-the-line brooms, new ones should make little difference. (And, per the Weasley twins, who spied on the Slytherins’ practice, the brooms did make a difference.)
Ergo, most students on the Slytherin Quidditch team could not afford new top-of-the-line brooms every year, or, perhaps, at all. So Slytherins are definitely not uniformly, and probably not even mostly, fabulously rich; the Malfoys are exceptional. (And note that the Blacks and Lestranges have apparently died out, and the Potter and Black fortunes have both passed to a half-blood….)
So then, are Slytherins unduly influential in politics and society? Currently? (Mind you, I imagine that the perception—which as I have previously pointed out, may be entirely incorrect—that most of You-Know-Who’s supporters were Slytherins may have severely damaged the house’s standing over the past twenty years or so.)
Well, ask Horace Slughorn; I’m sure his judgment is more to be trusted on such a matter than mine. He’s spent a long lifetime honing such observations, yes?
We never saw the exact composition of the current Slug Club. But we did see the first round of invitations (based mostly on family connections, before Horace got to know the current batch of students). On the Hogwarts Express Slughorn’s invitations were extended to one Slytherin (Blaise), one Ravenclaw (Belby), and four Gryffindors—Harry, Neville, Cormac, and Ginny. (Note too, Terri adds nastily, that there was only one girl of the six, and she an afterthought. Grr!) We know that Sluggy dropped Belby, Neville, and apparently Ginny, and added Hermione. It’s apparent from this guest list that—to put it mildly—Slughorn doesn’t consider his house to be unduly influential. And, er, which house seems to be? (And, BTW, the two known Purebloods both evaporate.)
In fact, ask the well-researched Hermione Granger. On her first Hogwarts Express ride, she gave an absolutely Slytherin reason for wanting to be Sorted into one house over another: “I’ve been asking around, and I hope I’m in [X], it sounds by far the best; I hear Dumbledore himself was in it….”
*
All of this would certainly throw some light—or darkness—on the appeal Voldemort’s stated objectives might have had to some of the WW’s pureblood supremacists. That faction, by the time Tom started to whisper in its horrified, fascinated ears, was in decline. They were bleeding to death, and they knew it, however vehemently they might have denied the truth.
With every passing year they were losing numbers, power, financial standing, and prestige.
And the result of some of those Pureblood scions desperately throwing in their lot in behind Lord Voldemort (who proved, oddly enough, to be a Halfblood) was probably to accelerate that slow decline to a swift broom-ride to destruction.
Ain’t karma grand when one gets to see it work?
Well, maybe in Salazar’s day. But now? Not only does the house necessarily contain non-purebloods—it’s entirely possible that purebloods may even not be in the majority any more.
At least according to what JKR has told us, and a very little basic math.
Part I: Are (Almost) All Slytherins Purebloods?
Consider: JKR apparently said in interviews that purebloods make up about a quarter of the Hogwarts students (and magical population), Muggleborns another quarter, and people of mixed ancestry the rest. Mind, the text actually suggests that the number of “true” purebloods may be a much smaller minority than that—c.f. Ron in CoS explaining to Hermione that Draco’s pureblood supremacist views make no sense because hardly anyone is actually “pure” any more, and Hermione’s observation in GoF that Voldemort’s supporters (all several dozen of them, as it transpires) could not be comprised exclusively of purebloods because there aren’t enough of them. But we’ll take that figure of 25% as a theoretical maximum and see what happens.
(See, by the way, Jodel’s essay “The Rise of the Mudbloods” for a very in-depth discussion of wizard population dynamics. I’m just looking at the ramifications for one house, Slytherin; Madam RedHen looked at wizard society in general. http://www.redhen-publications.com/Mudb
Hogwarts is divided into four houses. Either each contains approximately one-fourth of the student population, or some houses must contain markedly more or fewer students than the others. Yet we have no evidence at all for the latter being the case. No house table in the great hall is noted as being sparsely occupied or overcrowded, nor are we told that the core subjects’ class size varies wildly according to which house our POV Gryffindors share a particular class with. So let’s provisionally assume the houses are approximately equal in size.
So, in Harry’s class there are supposedly about 40 students, about 10 in each house, 28 of whom are named or described. And supposedly about one-fourth of them should be purebloods. Let’s say a normal range of 8-12 (10 +/- 20%).
But Neville, Ron, Ernie, and a Ravenclaw girl, Morag MacDougall, are stated to be purebloods. That leaves 4-8 purebloods to fill Slytherin House’s ten slots. So already Slytherin cannot be pureblood-only.
But it gets worse. Seven non-Slytherin students in Harry’s year are identified as half-bloods, three (only!) as Muggleborns (two if one excludes Dean Thomas), and seven others as either pure or mixed (Wizarding relatives are mentioned, and/or we know that they attend Hogwarts under the D.E. occupation). If even a third of those not-sures are purebloods, that leaves us 2-6 purebloods left to be in Slytherin. If half of the not-sures are, that leaves us 0-4.
It is, in fact, entirely possible that Draco, Millicent, and Vincent (whose surnames we find on the Black Family Tree) are the only pureblood Slytherins in their year. It’s even possible—remotely—that Draco is the only Slytherin pureblood; he is, after all, the only one we know for certain. Canon doesn’t contradict that reading, and statistics allow it.
Nor does the problem go away when we look at other years. We know that house affiliation often runs in families. So the Lovegoods may have been sorting to Ravenclaw for a while, the Prewetts scurrying along with the Longbottoms, Potters and Weasleys into Gryffindor, the Diggorys proud Hufflepuffs of long standing—see where this is heading? We know of all these pureblood families sending their children to houses other than Slytherin. But any pureblood not in Slytherin means a space in Slytherin that must be filled by a non-pureblood, if the house is to be kept in balance with the rest of Hogwarts.
In fact, look at the fifteen families whose blood was pure enough to mix with Blacks according what’s been published of the Black Family Tree. Compare those names to known students in the last two generations (Harry’s and his father’s). We find six names attached to Slytherins: Flint, Bulstrode, Crabbe, Rosier, Lestrange, and Malfoy. We find three Gryffindor families, a probable Gryffindor, & a Hufflepuff: Longbottom, Potter, Weasley, Prewett, and MacMillan. We have three with no students identified in the last two generations: Yaxley, Gamp and Burke. And we have one whose house affiliation was never stated: Crouch.
(Do it the other way and look at members of the original OotP known to be purebloods: Gideon & Fabian, Frank & Alice, James & Sirius. If we assume that all Purebloods not STATED to have sorted elsewhere were Slytherins, we’d have at least four Slytherins [besides Severus, who’s undercover] in the original Order. Shouldn’t Hagrid have mentioned that to Harry? Alternatively, if we hold to the impression that Order members were mostly Gryffs, and consider that the Prewetts’ nephews and Longbottoms’ son are Gryffs, we’d have at least 6 Gryff Purebloods in the generation before this one.)
Just on names, we have for this sample (the Blacks’ marital connections) at BEST 73% of pureblood families tending to sort to Slytherin; at worst, it may be as low as 46%. So either Slytherin House is becoming smaller and smaller, or it contains between, say, 27% to 54% Half-bloods and Muggleborns.
If you look at the Black family’s possible pureblood relatives and marital connections only in the most recent generation, Harry’s, it looks even worse: we know of one each Flint, Bulstrode, Crabbe, and Malfoy in Slytherin (four), versus seven Weasleys, a Longbottom, and a MacMillan (nine in other houses).
So if Slytherin House makes up even close to a quarter of the Hogwarts population, and if purebloods do make up a quarter of the Wizarding population, purebloods are probably either already a minority or in imminent danger of slipping into a minority in their “own” house.
Just for grins, let’s try the numbers to see how much smaller Slytherin house would be by now if it were accepting only purebloods and the vanishingly rare exceptionally talented half-blood (say, one per generation or two… Tom Riddle, Severus Snape). Let’s take the 46-73% range for purebloods choosing to sort into Slytherin, and further assume that the other three houses (not being prejudiced about who they accept) are roughly equal. If 3/4 of purebloods sort to Slytherin (and in effect almost no one else does or can), Slytherin house would gain about 18% of incoming students, with the remaining 82% being roughly evenly dispersed among the other three houses (about 27% each). In Harry’s class (of 40), that would be about 7 Slytherins, with about 11children in each other house.
In other words, if just one-quarter of purebloods sorted to other houses and Slytherin accepted (almost) no one else, Slytherin would have about two-thirds the students of other houses.
If it’s more like 54% of purebloods who choose other houses, that would leave Slytherin with about 11-12% of total students, and each other house at close to 30%. In other words, each of the other houses would now outnumber Slytherin by very nearly 3:1.
And Slytherin House still managed to win the Quidditch and House Cups for years, until Harry arrived to throw things off? Now THAT is a tribute to the power of ambition! And to Harry’s powers of obliviousness (okay, Harry’s obtuseness at least IS canon) —Slytherin house holds only one-third to two-thirds of the students in Gryffindor, and Harry never once notices, if only to think spitefully, “Well, it makes sense that no one would ever sort there if they could go elsewhere!”
But I think it’s more reasonable to assume that Slytherin House, whatever Salazar’s stated preferences, has for a while now been accepting ambitious mixed-bloods and Muggleborns without all that much of a fuss.
*
Part II: Possible Changes in Attitudes to Blood “Superiority” Over Time
Please note that Draco Pureblood Malfoy never once used the opprobrious epithet ‘Mudblood’ of Hermione (or anyone) until after SHE had mortally insulted HIM by asserting that Malfoy could never have made his house’s Quidditch team without cheating. (Maybe Hermione had been channeling Trelawney in this scene—and how Hermione would have hated that!—and projected forward to HBP, when only cheating—hers—could get someone on the team. In my grade school, we used to sing to someone who’d accused another of transgressing schoolyard codes, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, what you say is what you are.”)
Before Draco entered Hogwarts, he had an encounter with a kid dressed in Muggle cast-offs—and he tried, repeatedly, to strike up a conversation with him. Only after the presumed Muggle-born had rudely snubbed his every conversational overture did Draco start asking about Harry’s family and pontificating about how Hogwarts shouldn’t let “the other sort” in. (Thanks, duj, for having pointed this out.)
IOW: Draco didn’t start with Pureblood supremacist rantings the moment he met his first (if illusory) Muggle-born. He turned to that after being snubbed by the supposed Muggle-born, perhaps to protect himself from being hurt by Harry’s rejection, perhaps to hit back.
And he didn’t talk about blood purity; he talked about the outsiders “not knowing our ways.”—which Harry had, in fact, just been demonstrating.
At the beginning of CoS when Lucius criticized Draco’s grades, Draco protested “the teachers all have favorites, that Hermione Granger—”
It’s his father who pointed out that Hermione was “a girl of no wizard family” who nonetheless beat Draco “in every exam.” (Um—every exam? So that would include Potions? Then Snape did grade fairly on his finals, as some of us had otherwise surmised? And, er, no one else, apparently, beat Draco’s exam scores? Oh, how he must have hated Hermione--not for her blood status, but as his only serious academic rival. And notice that neither father nor son, speaking privately, attached opprobrious epithets to the despiséd Hermione.)
And Mr. Borgin, listening in, inserted (greasily, per JKR), “It’s the same all over. Wizard blood is counting for less everywhere—”
Let’s get this straight, because subtle differences matter. The “stooping” Mr. Borgin (who may therefore have been older, of an earlier pureblood generation) implied strongly that “wizard blood” ought to “count” to get Draco the better grade, regardless of whether Draco’s performance had actually merited it.
Lucius Malfoy, in contrast, argued explicitly that his pureblood son ought to be able to EARN a higher grade than “a girl of no wizard family.”
And Draco protested (unconvincingly, in my view) that Muggle-born Hermione’s higher grade was earned by being a teacher’s pet, and thus (implicitly) that truly fair grading would have put Draco first.
Let’s review Draco’s logic. A scion of the Slytherin pureblood filthy-wealthy elite finds it plausible (in 1992) to assert that he’s the put-upon victim of unfair grading at Hogwarts? That Dumbledore’s teachers (including Snape?) would unjustly grade a Muggle-born Gryffindor higher than a rich pureblood Slytherin?
Oh, my.
Not that I accept Draco’s excuse, but that Draco could offer that argument to his father and expect to be believed casts a FASCINATING light on the Hogwarts subculture.
*
Part III: Is “Blood Purity,” in itself, the Only/Primary Source of Status in Slytherin House?
Clearly, being ‘well-born’ (pure) is a POSSIBLE source of status in Slytherin house, as in the WW in general. But the only one? Or even necessarily the overriding one? As a source of status, after all, it’s competing with wealth, fame, connections to the political power elite, raw magical talent, intelligence, even beauty… with NONE of which is it directly correlated by now.
We saw that Draco combined pure birth, wealth, connection to the power elite, intelligence, magical power, and a creative talent for adolescent mocking humor. We know that at least some of the other Slytherins in his year followed his lead. But we also know that when his family lost status, he lost influence: Slughorn shunned him as a DE’s son in HBP, Crabbe ended up rejecting him in DH as a failed DE’s son/ DE. His purity of blood hadn’t changed, but his (changing) family status apparently trumped that. On both (on all?) sides.
And remember that canon showed us that Draco pulled the “Mudblood” card on Hermione only after she had both bested him academically and viciously insulted him.
It’s quite possible that only those who came up short in every other possible arena would automatically totally privilege pureblood birth over all other considerations (*cough* Marvolo Gaunt).
On the other hand, there’s the underlying blood prejudice that Slughorn so innocently expressed to Harry, that surely, people of magical birth MUST (in general) be more adept at magic. But though Sluggy thought Lily’s and Hermione’s brilliance unusual, he was not at all surprised by half-blood Harry’s proficiency in Potions. More to the point, Sluggy specifically and repeatedly attributed Harry’s talent to LILY’s blood running in Harry’s veins, not to the thousand-year-pure Potter blood with which Lily’s was mixed. So Slughorn, at least, seems to think that ANY magical inheritance is sufficient to account for magical greatness; he doesn’t think that “purity” is necessary. (Note this was also Hagrid’s view—he told Harry that of course Harry would be a thumpin’ great wizard, with the parents he had. Hagrid did NOT say that of course Harry would be great as the last scion of the Potters, despite his father’s unfortunate misalliance.) So the prejudice in the general population seems to be more that it’s astonishing that magical brilliance could emerge out of nothing, not (among any but the loony fringe like Walburga and Marvolo), that purity of blood is required for magical power.
And indeed, in areas of Muggle mastery we Muggles generally think the same. We’re more astonished if an Olympic athlete is the child of dedicated couch-potatoes than a trained-from-birth scion of top athletes; and at my (top-ranked, private, expensive) college there were far fewer first-generation scholars than children of the professionally-educated classes. And, um, we first-generationers felt ourselves at a bit of a disadvantage compared to those for whom higher education was an obvious birthright….
Moreover, Sluggy at least allowed that the rule, magical birth is a prerequisite for magical greatness, could be disproved in any specific case. A given Muggleborn, such as Lily or Hermione or Dirk Cresswell, could win personal acceptance without necessarily dislodging the overall belief.
What’s the saying?
“A Muggleborn has to do something twice as well as a pureblood in order to be thought half as good.
Fortunately, that’s not difficult.”
But that you had to be “pure” to win acclaim…. there’s no more evidence (that I know of) that that’s true in general in Slytherin, than that it’s true in the WW in general. That is, there is evidence that (some) people value blood purity, and that some (mostly losers) value it highly. But the most-honored person in Wizarding Britain when we readers entered it was Dumbledore the Half-blood. Who had been contested by (and defeated) Riddle the secret Half-blood, that promoter of Pureblood supremacy.
*
Part IV: Mortal Insults versus Insults between Friends
Blood status was not the only type of “superiority” that we saw deployed against enemies, but not against (supposed) friends and allies.
Note how the indisputably-wealthy Malfoys and Blacks used their superior economic status to insult their less well-off enemies. Lucius insulted Arthur for his poverty; his son regularly taunted Ron and the other Weasleys about being poor, starting from the moment Draco identified the strange redhead on the Hogwarts Express as an enemy Weasley. In PoA Draco jeered at Lupin, whom he didn’t like, for shabby robes. And Draco called Hagrid (excuse me, Professor Hagrid—though he wasn’t then) a servant, disparagingly.
Yet Severus Snape lived in a Muggle slum, in a moldering tiny house with shabby furnishings—and Narcissa Malfoys knew exactly where to find him, so his domicile (and what it revealed about Snape’s background) had presumably not been a secret from the Malfoys. Though Bellatrix denigrated his home, Narcissa did not—nor did we ever see Lucius or Draco do so, even when Draco was fighting with Snape in HBP. Nor do we have any reason to think that Vincent or Gregory’s families commanded anything like the Malfoy fortune, yet we never saw Draco attempt to hold their comparative poverty against them.
Similarly, we never saw Sirius Black hold Remus’s poverty against him. But Black did call Severus Lucius’s lapdog, insinuating (among other things) that Snape was a hanger-on rather than a true friend of the wealthy Malfoys.
It seems that economic disadvantage can be used as a weapon—and that such weapons are to be used against enemies, not against allies or friends.
So is blood status the same in the WW? Something a “superior” MIGHT use (as one might use superior economic status) to taunt an enemy, but that one would never invoke against an ally/friend?
Bellatrix clearly disparaged both Snape’s economic status and his genetic heritage when she characterized his home as being situated in “a Muggle dung heap.” Yet Narcissa, equally bred of the Blacks and married to the Malfoy millions, didn’t encourage Bella’s criticism.
And which of the women, again, was visiting Severus to ask him for a favor?
Yet not even Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Voldemort’s right hand (she wished!), criticized Snape’s half-blood birth or relative poverty to his face, though we know she inherited her aunt Walpurga’s mania on the subject of blood purity. Instead, she focused on his supposed failures to achieve their Lord’s ends.
There are insults one doesn’t voice, at least not aloud to one’s allies’ faces.
Bellatrix and Severus were, after all, allies in devoted service to one Lord.
*
Part V: Is the House of Ambition Currently the “Best” House?
A few other unsupported misconceptions about Slytherins and/or purebloods—are Slytherins in general, purebloods in general, or specifically Slytherin purebloods all (or mostly) members of a politically powerful and fabulously wealthy elite?
Well. Pureblood families described in canon as rich include the Malfoys, Blacks, Lestranges (all Slytherin) and the Potters (Gryffindor). The Crouches (house unknown) certainly had not been hurting for money, and Hufflepuff’s heiress Smith had been fabulously wealthy back in the forties. Zacharias is said to be a half-blood, so if he’s her relative the family, like the Potter family, is no longer entirely “pure.” The Gaunts emphatically were not wealthy, nor are the current Weasleys or the Lovegoods. The Longbottoms don’t seem to be, though their reluctance to spend money on top-quality gear for Neville may reflect their opinion of the near-Squib more than their financial standing. Slytherin Blaise Zabini’s mother is wealthy through her deceased husbands—none of whose blood status is known, nor is her own or her son’s. Nor, in fact, is the former Mrs. Zabini’s house, nor the houses of any of her husbands.
Do we have canon evidence for the financial status of any other pureblood family now, or for any other Slytherin of whatever blood status?
Well, Slytherins Tom and Severus entered Hogwarts penniless. And who, after all, is more likely to be ambitious, someone born with a silver spoon in hir mouth or someone who has to scrabble for everything?
There’s no direct evidence for anyone else (that I recall). But… remember Draco’s second year, when Lucius bought the entire Slytherin Quidditch team Nimbus 2001 brooms to celebrate his son’s making the team (or, per Hermione, to bribe the team to accept his son)? That gesture makes no sense unless most of the team had previously, like the Weasley twins, been riding inferior brooms. If all or most of the team already had their own top-of-the-line brooms, new ones should make little difference. (And, per the Weasley twins, who spied on the Slytherins’ practice, the brooms did make a difference.)
Ergo, most students on the Slytherin Quidditch team could not afford new top-of-the-line brooms every year, or, perhaps, at all. So Slytherins are definitely not uniformly, and probably not even mostly, fabulously rich; the Malfoys are exceptional. (And note that the Blacks and Lestranges have apparently died out, and the Potter and Black fortunes have both passed to a half-blood….)
So then, are Slytherins unduly influential in politics and society? Currently? (Mind you, I imagine that the perception—which as I have previously pointed out, may be entirely incorrect—that most of You-Know-Who’s supporters were Slytherins may have severely damaged the house’s standing over the past twenty years or so.)
Well, ask Horace Slughorn; I’m sure his judgment is more to be trusted on such a matter than mine. He’s spent a long lifetime honing such observations, yes?
We never saw the exact composition of the current Slug Club. But we did see the first round of invitations (based mostly on family connections, before Horace got to know the current batch of students). On the Hogwarts Express Slughorn’s invitations were extended to one Slytherin (Blaise), one Ravenclaw (Belby), and four Gryffindors—Harry, Neville, Cormac, and Ginny. (Note too, Terri adds nastily, that there was only one girl of the six, and she an afterthought. Grr!) We know that Sluggy dropped Belby, Neville, and apparently Ginny, and added Hermione. It’s apparent from this guest list that—to put it mildly—Slughorn doesn’t consider his house to be unduly influential. And, er, which house seems to be? (And, BTW, the two known Purebloods both evaporate.)
In fact, ask the well-researched Hermione Granger. On her first Hogwarts Express ride, she gave an absolutely Slytherin reason for wanting to be Sorted into one house over another: “I’ve been asking around, and I hope I’m in [X], it sounds by far the best; I hear Dumbledore himself was in it….”
*
All of this would certainly throw some light—or darkness—on the appeal Voldemort’s stated objectives might have had to some of the WW’s pureblood supremacists. That faction, by the time Tom started to whisper in its horrified, fascinated ears, was in decline. They were bleeding to death, and they knew it, however vehemently they might have denied the truth.
With every passing year they were losing numbers, power, financial standing, and prestige.
And the result of some of those Pureblood scions desperately throwing in their lot in behind Lord Voldemort (who proved, oddly enough, to be a Halfblood) was probably to accelerate that slow decline to a swift broom-ride to destruction.
Ain’t karma grand when one gets to see it work?
Hermione made the connection between Draco's dad buying the whole team expensive equipment and him getting on the team.
Malfoy retaliated by calling her a racial slur, implying that she (and her family) were by their nature sub-human.
I'm curious - if she had been black and Malfoy had called her a 'filthy little nigger', would you still be jumping to his defence? Because there really isn't much difference.
night_train_fm
Here's a dictionary definition for you:
op·pro·bri·ous
–adjective
1.
conveying or expressing opprobrium, as language or a speaker: opprobrious invectives.
2.
outrageously disgraceful or shameful: opprobrious conduct.
What terri DID do was use the exact circumstances surrounding a particular incident of using a blood-based slur to investigate those situations in which the characters who hold prejudices based on blood find it acceptable to express that prejudice out loud, to the other person's face, with the term "Mudblood." And from there other situations in which one might expect them to use the term among themselves or to others and don't, and possible reasons why they don't.
That is, getting a sense of how the characters' prejudice gets manifested and why. How characters with bigoted attitudes actually interact with supposedly inferior people, and what this indicates about the nuances of what they actually think about blood, beyond simply "pure blood is better."
In attempting to understand these things and so get a better picture of certain characters and the WW as a whole, NOWHERE does terri say IT IS NOT WRONG TO BE BIGOTED. The essay is not a defense or a moral judgment on the phenomenon, merely an attempt to understand WHAT it is and HOW it is manifested.
Okay, Hermione didn't know for sure that Lucius had bought Draco's way onto the team - he COULD have bought the brooms afterwards - but it wasn't much of a stretch based on what she knew. Apparently making that link qualifies as a 'mortal insult', but Malfoy calling her the equivalent of the n-word is an 'opprobious epithet'. That, of course, raises another question: why the reluctance to call a racial slur a racial slur?
night_train_fm
Well, the question is how does Draco (and others) use said epithet. It turns out that in her entire first year at Hogwarts Hermione never heard the word. She had to ask what it meant (as opposed to the movie version of the same situation). Which means Draco and others of his upbringing and views were not using it in public on a regular basis. Draco had to be driven a bit off balance to use the word. He probably knew at the very least that using the word in broad daylight would be viewed negatively either by people of power or by people whose opinion mattered to him. (This is consistent with his parents never using the word within Harry's hearing while still implying heavily they were thinking somewhere along those lines, though possibly not entirely so.)
I can't answer for Terri why she chose this wording, but it does make for more fun reading. While Rowling probably meant mudblood to be a racial slur it is only such if you accept blood-based prejudice in the Potterverse as a good metaphor for real world racism. If you think blood-based prejudice is some other kind of prejudice that differs significantly from real world racism or that its criticism within the Potterverse is itself hypocritical and based in a broader kind of bigotry then comparing the word mudblood to real world racial slurs is inappropriate. Yes, mudblood is some kind of slur. Is it a racial slur? An ethnic slur? A slur of some other kind that does not exist in our world?
Never mind for a moment all the other Fantastic Racism in the books (against Muggles, half-breeds, werewolves, Giants, etc.) which overlaps with ableism... Pure-bloods, half-bloods, and Muggle-borns are all wizards and they all have magic and whichever one of those three they are, doesn't make a difference to their magic powers. That puts the blood-based prejudice (of wizard against wizard) in HP as going beyond being just an analogy - it's an actual demonstration of racism in action using the fictional world of HP as the backdrop with all it's magical trappings. And sadly, saying that someone has "dirty blood" (in one way or another) is a type of racial/ethnic slur that exists in real life.
Some of the instances of relations between human wizards and non-human magical beings is closer in some ways to some forms of real world human racism - I'd say the wizard/goblin situation is close. However the psychological and cognitive differences between some species make the situations non-equivalent (eg human/giant or human/house-elf).
For example, based on their heredity, Muggle-borns are deemed by some blood purists to be "thieves of magic" and not true wizards (not part of the wizard race). It's like saying one racial minority isn't part of the human race or is a lesser part of the human race. That's racism.
Furthermore, that there is even a negative distinction made between half-blood and pure-blood is a racist part of the wizarding world. Even if pure-bloods, half-bloods, and Muggle-borns are divided into three separate races within the wizard race, or divided into two separate races and a mixed race within the wizard race, they are still just as much part of the wizard race, and having prejudice against any wizard based on blood is still racist prejudice.
"Mudblood" is a slur hurled at a wizard based on their heredity/blood or perceived heredity/blood. It is therefore a racist slur.
But that's the entire problem. The wizarding world does not exist in a vacuum. The reason the inclusion of Muggle-borns creates an issue is because there are Muggles and because wizards can't ignore them.
I'm talking about wizard on wizard racism, here. Pure-bloods, half-bloods, and Muggle-borns are all wizards. Blood purists may deny that Muggle-borns are part of the wizard race, but that doesn't make it so. Regardless of whether Muggle-borns are "mutations" or have wizard ancestry somewhere, they are wizards and are part of the wizard race.
What definition of race would include people who share a certain trait even if possibly they do not share (recent) ancestry? The claim that Muggle-borns by virtue of having magic are the same as other wizards and should be accepted as part of wizarding society while different and separate from their Muggle parents and the Muggle community in which they spent the first 11 years of their lives is not self-evident. There are several alternative logically consistent ways to go: One is complete separation of members of the wizarding world and the rest starting from any given date. This means wizards do not live in Muggle villages or cities but entirely in enclaves such as Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley (yes, the Weasleys would have to move), no more intake of Muggle-borns, no wizard-Muggle marriages. Future Muggle-borns figure their way on their own, for better or worse. Another way is getting rid of wizarding secrecy and subjecting wizards to the law of the land. All depends on whether having magic is more salient to one's identity than being human or being the child of one's parents or a member of the community one was born to.
Imagine countries A and B, and religions X and Y. In country A almost all are of religion X, but there are some who immigrated from country B, where religion Y is practiced. Some of the immigrants from B to A convert to the X religion. If native As (of X religion) accept the converts and their children because they are Xs like themselves but not the immigrants who retain their original religion are they any better than those who reject all immigrants regardless of conversion?
Furthermore, that there is even a negative distinction made between half-blood and pure-blood is a racist part of the wizarding world. Even if pure-bloods, half-bloods, and Muggle-borns are divided into three separate races within the wizard race, or divided into two separate races and a mixed race within the wizard race, they are still just as much part of the wizard race, and having prejudice against any wizard based on blood is still racist prejudice.
That it is accepted that a wizarding race exists is in itself a racist (or semi-racist) sentiment. And it is not true that the wizarding race is divided into 3 separate races. Harry is a half-blood with a pureblood father, and it is possible his children or grandchildren will count as purebloods again. How is this an example of separate races?
IF one accepts the distinction magic/no magic as the essential indicator of race here (that which distinguishes one race from another), then the claim that pureblood prejudice against Muggleborns is specifically racist prejudice falls apart. Racism is prejudice based upon *difference* in race, seeing one race as superior to another. If Muggleborns are part of the 'wizarding race' based upon their ability to do magic, the prejudice against them is based upon a factor *other* than that which distinguishes the races in question from one another.
That it is a matter of ancestry has little import, because although the essential difference is to a great degree hereditary, Muggleborns are either (depending on if you believe JKR's interview) by definition sports who come by their defining racial trait *regardless of* ancestry, or they are of mixed (Muggle and Squib/Wizarding) heritage but somehow count as "magic enough." Sort of like how in Nazi Germany someone with a certain degree of Jewish ancestry counted as Jewish. The parallel isn't perfect, however.
Hence "blood-based," a way of indicating that ancestry is at issue in the prejudice even though the key distinction between the races is *not.* The real difficulty here is the separation of the defining racial trait from ancestry, a situation utterly unlike anything in the real world. The fact that the situation of the Muggleborn is one without a real-world parallel is one thing that really makes the racism analogy difficult, actually. We don't talk about whether a Chinese kid born to two Irish people counts as white or Chinese, because it's simply impossible based upon real-world genetics. The defining feature *is* heredity, in a way that the situation of Muggleborns totally undoes. The only parallel to the argument that Muggleborns are really wizards or just thieves would be to say that a person with Irish parents is "really" Chinese or is just pretending to be Chinese/stole Chineseness - it makes no sense in terms of race as understood in the real world.
IF, on the other hand, ancestry *does* count as the defining racial trait, regardless of actual magical ability, then Muggleborns really would a separate race from purebloods, and halfbloods would be of mixed-race ancestry. That is, purebloods have all wizarding ancestry while Muggleborns have Muggle ancestry. In which case anti-Muggleborn prejudice *would* be racist by definition. However, this model also falls apart on closer inspection, because the defining trait by which *ancestry* is counted is again possession of magic, only on the part of one's ancestors rather than oneself (pureblood wizards descending by definition from wizards while Muggleborns descend from Muggles, people without magic). And this is a trait which, given the existence of Muggleborns, can vary from one generation to the next regardless of parentage. We don't know for certain if the child of two Muggleborns would be considered Muggleborn themselves or halfblood, but we do know that the child of a Muggleborn and a pureblood is considered a halfblood, and the child of a Muggleborn and a halfblood would likely also be a halfblood. We know that intermarriage with wizards is seen as eliminating Muggle ancestry after a few generations, and this seems to be the case even with halfbloods. A child can be pureblood even if *neither* of their parents is. So race as understood in this model is something that can change from generation to generation - again, paralleling nothing in the real world.
Either way, it falls apart, because the distinguishing feature has to do with possession of magic, something partly but NOT exclusively tied to heritage. While, in the real world, racism is by definition to do with features tied directly to and only to heritage.
Pure-blood, half-blood, and Muggle-born are each counted as different from each other within wizarding society by virtue of birth, even though they are all wizards. They all have whatever genetic factor allows them to be magical and they can't choose whether or not they are magical as opposed to Muggle (it would be like trying to change one's blood type from A to B), and yet there are these distinctions of blood made in wizarding society despite the fact that they are all intrinsically magical. The fact that a distinction of blood can tie into one's worth in wizarding society points to institutional racism. Racism is a part of wizarding society (just as racism is part of real world human societies, sadly).
Whether you want to call it prejudice based on race or blood, it still amounts to the same thing. There is a socially constructed separateness based on blood/heritage within the wizarding world. Blood/heritage can not be changed, even if the person was willing to change it. They are born from who they are born from, and that is that. If there is prejudice based on who they are born from, then they run the danger of facing prejudice based on that. Regardless of how bad any other kind of prejudice or bigotry is, and regardless of what other kinds of prejudice and bigotry exist, blood prejudice is racial prejudice. Again, race is defined as "a group of persons related by common descent or heredity" and heredity is what is used to define a wizard as pure-blood, half-blood or Muggle-born, therefore blood prejudice fits the definition of racial prejudice.
Muggle-borns (or half-bloods with one Muggle parent) coming from different cultural backgrounds does not make the racism any better or excuse it. The challenge of dealing with any issues related to Muggles that are connected with wizard relatives or spouses does not make racism any more excusable, either. The wizarding world refusing to admit Muggle-borns or refusing to allow Muggle to wizard marriages would be very oppressive and racist and I doubt it would solve anything. Getting rid of wizarding secrecy may or may not be the right thing to do, but it wouldn't eradicate blood prejudice (blood prejudice existed before wizarding secrecy).
"You all know, of course, that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago - the precise date is uncertain - by the four greatest witches and wizards of the age. They built this castle together, far from prying Muggle eyes, for it twas an age when magic was feared by common people, and witches and wizards suffered much persecution." - Professor Binns (CoS)
The International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was first signed in 1689 (DH16), well after the founding of Hogwarts and appearance of blood prejudice (remember Slytherin wanted the purest blood for his House and I doubt he was the first to come up with the concept of blood purity as a value, anyway.)
Finally, denying that blood prejudice is racism doesn't make it any less foul, nor does comparing and contrasting it to other forms of prejudice, nor does pointing out that the wizarding world is chock-a-block with racism. If you want to reject the label of racism for blood prejudice, then I submit to you that blood prejudice is just as foul as whatever you would call racism.
Alison
Once again, I can't help but think that sounds like you're apologising for him. Even if he had to be 'driven a bit off balance', what Hermione said to him does not remotely equate to any kind of slur (ethnic, racial, whatever)*. In any case, he stopped needing to be 'off balance' pretty quickly.
'I've just washed my hand, you see, don't want a Mudblood sliming it up'
'You're not telling me someone's asked that to the Ball? Not the long-molared Mudblood?'
'If you're wondering what the smell is, Mother, a Mudblood just walked in'
Need I go on?
night_train_fm
*And yeah, the same applies to Snape using the m-word on Lily.
Once he decides Hermione is one of his enemies (or rivals, or his forbidden romantic interest - all those interpretations work) he uses the word deliberately to provoke her and her friends. It's not a very mature way to deal with rivalry (or express interest, or even veil one's interest), but who said Draco was particularly mature?
Please tell me you're joking about that last one. I know we agree on precious little regarding HP, but please tell me you're joking about that last one.
('bet you anything the next one dies...pity it wasn't Granger')
night_train_fm
Imagine for a moment that this is a real-world situation where a young man (Draco) finds himself drawn to another young man (Hermione) and there is family/society/what-have-you prejudice against such a homosexual union.
He'd be conflicted and in denial, and in this case, want to lash out against the object of his feelings, in the immature belief that this would somehow make his peers less aware of his feelings.
The need to fit in with his society/peer group could be strong enough to evoke such a reaction, rather than admitting to himself and to others that he is attracted to someone his society or peer group sees as "forbidden".
Alison
There is no evidence from canon to suggest that Draco's hatred of Hermione has anything to do with repressed sexual feelings for her. And even if this were the case, it would be more pathetic than mitigating (I can't admit that I like this girl, therefore I advocate genocide against her and her kind.)
Whether Draco actually has the stomach to go through with murder (doubtful given what happens in HBP) is another question entirely, but it doesn't change the fact that he was a racist twit for much of his youth.
-Chalts
I agree. Clearly, self defense is the same:
An attack is bad, so defending in a way that, in any way, might hurt the attacker is as bad as the attacker itself.
Those who are attacked should just know better and be bigger people and let attackers get away with it. It's better for everyone.
The attacker gets away with their bigotry. Plus, the victim remains attacked and victimized and keeps in their place.
Perfect. Well, except for the victim, but who cares for victims of bigotry? Better they shut up and go away.
Hermione insulted Draco - he responded with a slur at her blood status.
Draco insulted Ron - he responded with a physical attack (that was stopped by Severus' arrival).
Nobody was acting in defense in either of these scenes. People were reacting inappropriately to provocation.
Wow.
Ron took a swing at Malfoy (specifically) for insulting his family - something Malfoy CHOSE to do. It had nothing to do with Malfoy being white / rich / pureblood / etc.
Malfoy, OTOH, disparaged an entire race - sorry, 'blood status' - in response to Hermione's not-unfounded suggestion that he'd bought his way onto the Slytherin Quidditch team. If she was wrong, he could have simply told her so, or at least restricted his insults to things that applied to her specifically. Instead, he chose a racist slur and completely invalidated his position.
night_train_fm