More multiculti mush

JK Rowling confirms that there were Jewish wizards at Hogwarts | Books | The Guardian:

And "LGBT" ones, too!

Sigh.

I love the Harry Potter movies. I just watched two of them yesterday. For the umpteenth time.
I forced myself to "read" the books on mp3 audio just to see how they compared and to give better ground to my opinions. And the movies are better.

On the level of plot narrative and characters, creation of an imaginative world, Ms Rowling is a truly gifted woman. While not a great writer, she is an extraordinary storyteller.

But as a moralist, she is as empty as Gene Roddenbury and Star Trek Drek.

Here again, in the above story, we have her trumpeting her all-inclusive values about Hogwarts, just to make sure we know she is orthodox and bien-pensant.

But without effect, at all.

Like Albus Dumbledore's homosexuality, the ethnic and racial, the cultural and religious "diversity" of the Wizarding World is all window-dressing in the service of highmindedness, but it has absolutely zero zip zilch nada effect on either the narrative or the characters. None of it makes the slightest bit of difference. The only character whose ethnicity has any bearing on his character is the irascible Irishman Seamus, who has a talent for blowing things up. IRA anyone? There's prominent inter-racial dating, for example, but hardly any (none, to my knowledge) inter-racial marriage.

As I said before, every single one of the characters of color could be transformed into the homogeneous and native White British mass who form the great majority of the human characters without the slightest change to anything at all but names and externals like skin color and dress. Otherwise, nothing different. Make Dumbledore straight: what's the difference? There's a Jew in Hogwarts? Who knew?

In the Wizarding World and in the world of Star Trek, all the "diverse" humans act like White British people*. Aside from externals, there is nothing distinctive about them. And in both these worlds, all the genetic differences of skill, attitude, behavior, capacity, tendency and sense of group identity are projected out onto non-human groups, other species, where it is presumably both ok and obvious. The generalizations (aka "stereotypes") that would be rejected with shrieks of horror if applied to intra-human groups are even more loudly asserted and trumpeted when applied either to non-human magicals (giants, goblins, elves, centaurs, etc.) or to non-human aliens (Vulcans, Klingons, Ferengi, Borg, etc.)

I'm not really complaining. Although Rowlings intentions are clearly to placate the Gods of the Facebook Trendings, this lack of follow-through makes the movies watchable for me.

But all this inclusive-diverse preening reveals the emptiness of the liberal PC multiculti ideology. In order to make real stories, and not just ideological cartoons, it either has to ignore or violate its own principles.

In case you'd like to hear me rant --intelligently, though, as always!-- about this, read here.

*A random thought. Maybe this is JK Rowlings' real (and gasp, racist) message, even if it is unconscious: that the way for us all to get along is for the minorities to keep their little accoutrements of skin and name but to become, in every other way, wholly English. (Except for Seamus.) Now that's a program ExC could get on board with!

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