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Prejudice In Harry Potter

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First published in 1997, the Harry Potter series is the creation of J.K. Rowling. Her novels tell the struggles of a child in a new world – a world of magic and fantasy set in the 1990s that was settled in the lull between two wars of dark against light. The main character is an orphan named Harry Potter, who, as an infant, on the night of his parent’s murder, managed to escape his own murder by causing a killing curse to rebound back on the caster: The Dark Lord. The public raised him on a pedestal as the defeater of the Dark Lord, and when he returns, they expect him to do it again. He’s their hero and is expected to act like a hero typically would. But Harry is ignorant of all this until his eleventh birthday when he is reintroduced to the …show more content…

Dark social prejudices that were noticeable to a small degree before, blow up in this part of the series. The magical world is plagued with prejudice among the three races of wizards: purebloods, wizards that have only magical ancestors; half-bloods, wizards with magical and non-magical ancestry; and muggleborns, wizards with non-magical ancestry. The purebloods think themselves better than the other two, but more distinctly over the muggleborn. In the seventh novel, the racial prejudice comes to a head with the pureblood controlled government starting an inquisition against the muggleborn; trying to claim that they stole their magic and sentencing them to a Dementor’s Kiss if found guilty. A Dementor’s Kiss being the act of having your soul removed by a dark magical creature that proceeds to eat a soul after “kissing” its victim. It’s a rather horrifying punishment. Not only this, but before the muggleborn inquisition, in the fifth book, the ministry tried to drag Harry’s name through the mud for even saying the Dark Lord had returned. “But now a short, angry wizard stood in front of him, refusing, point-blank, to accept the prospect of disruption in his comfortable and ordered world – to believe that Voldemort could have risen,” (Shmoop “Good vs. Evil”), the Ministry were too scared of political downfall and too scared to face a Dark Lord, so they tried the age old tactic of ignoring the problem in hope of the problem going away – which never works. The ministry only succeeded in turning the public against a fifteen year old boy, and by denying the Dark Lord’s return, endangered the entire magical community. For some more proof of corruption, the ministry allowed a power hungry member of their staff to take up a teaching position at

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