Rewatching the last of the Harry Potter movies with my kids last night, I noticed that JK Rowling has written the Irish kid at Hogwarts, a Seamus Finnegan, to be the one with the [skill of blowing things up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSQ8mWARnSo&ab_channel=DutchHPfan1992).
“Ooh, that’s a bit racist, no?” I wondered out loud. My 12 year old daughter thinks it’s probably nothing and that I am reading too much into it. Perhaps she’s right – have I turned into a grumpy old cynic? What does r/ireland think?
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by antipositron
20 comments
Just enjoy the film ffs – sick of some loonies in recent years trying to make the Harry Potter films look like *Birth of a Nation*.
Wasn’t she called out on this before by the offended types.
Tbh if it was on its own it probably wouldn’t have bothered me too much apart from a bit of eyerolling, but she is fairly consistently odd about the naming and characteristics and stuff of all the international characters. Iirc the Irish student is especially thick in the books too.
Given Rowing’s views it’s not too surprising.
I think its a bit of relatively harmless casual racism from Rowling. There’s a lot of stereotyping in her characters.
I mean he is also trying to turn water into rum if memory serves correctly. I don’t think it takes too much of a stretch to say he’s a bit of a stereotype.
That stuff is film only, so she had less of an input. It’s not in the books.
Jk Rowling is a fairly uncreative hack. That she turns the Irish guy into an explosives person is par for the course.
Your 12 year old has a more reasonable perspective on this than you do, you should probably listen to her more often.
I’ve thought about it a lot, as I‘m a devoted Harty Potter fan. I concluded in the end that it was just a very clumsy error of judgment on JKR’s part, which an editor should have picked up. (Given that this trait of Seamus’s is evident from the start of the series, it‘s not as though JKR was too established an author for such a correction) But taken in the context of the rest of her writing, I do not see racism or xenophobia at all, but misdirected humour. She wasn’t paying sufficient attention with that joke.
Its pointless to assess it in the context of her present travails, as none of that has any relevance to the 1990s creation of Mr Finnegan, to whom she appears to apologise later anyway (as though she recognised her earlier misstep) both in the Quidditch World Cup, and when he very dramatically serves in the Battle for Hogwarts. She corrects a minor sin which she recocgnises should never have been committed by a children’s author.
Wait till you find out who inspired the banking goblins!
did he have hair on his chinnegan
It’s a fucking story about wizards.
It drips with stereotypes : the prim Scottish accented school marm and the Irish pyrotechnics expert…
She really leans into that Victorian era of caricature…
Still, at least it’s not Leap Year, behorrah!
It isn’t racist because he really was good at blowing things up.
No, you’re not overreacting, in fact the whole thing is littered with godawful stereotypes.
The exact type of thing you’d expect of a book written by an English person who wanted to have foreigners in their story made no attempt whatsoever to do any research or avoid any local stereotypes.
There’s a Chinese character whose name might as well be “Ching Chong”. As well a load of other students in the school who are all one-off token characters surrounded by white English ones.
The French magic school is basically an entire group of sultry, oversexed women.
The Eastern European school is a robot factory of hyper masculine men with short hair.
And while I wouldn’t have personally caught it the first time around, the appearance of the goblins and their role as the bankers of the wizarding world, is a little too *on the nose.*
Yeah, there are a series of blogs on the stereotypes and (in some cases) outright racism in the Harry Potter universe. Probably best just to try and enjoy it for what it is, otherwise it’ll get totally ruined.
JKR’s writing is littered with subtle, likely unconscious insights into how she sees the world. her non-white/non-english characters rely heavily on racial/ethnic stereotypes, her female characters tend to revolve around their relationship to men, and her world building and narrative structures are full of elements which treat discrimination and/or prejudice against specific groups as a positive/necessary thing.
it’s more subtle in her earlier work, and given her recent graceless plummet towards open bigotry, has become extremely explicit in her newer work – the most obvious example being her pen name, Robert Galbraith. the real world Robert Galbraith invented conversion therapy. you know, the pseudoscientific practice which claims to change sexual orientation, and which has recently been declared torture and abuse in multiple countries.
tldr: if you see something in JKR’s work and think, “hang on a moment, that’s a bit prejudiced”, you’re probably correct. i think at the start it was unconscious biases, but as the years have gone on, and she has shown her true colours, the unconscious elements have become much more noticeable.
Fucking hell, if you don’t like it, stop reading it.
The Asian character’s name is some variation of Ching Chong.
There are stereotypes incorporated into the characters definitely.