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faircommentfuckoff:

#Harry Potter and the Representation I Didn’t Actually Bother to Write But Still Want Credit For

Burnburnburn

I both love and hate that we’re growing more and more aware of just how problematic JK Rowling really is

UK core Jewish population is about 1/220, and out of a thousand wizarding kids, roughly…? Not going to be a huge amount, sorry. 

This was taken out of context anyway by the looks of it, thanks, hellsite.

Jewish population = currently 0.4% of the UK’s population. 

That’s even less than the UK’s British Chinese population (0.5% of the UK’s population, and other East Asian races don’t feature because there’s even fewer of them), and according to Wikipedia, around 60% of British Jews go to Jewish-only schools – which probably explains why so many of us won’t have gone to school with (or met) a British Jewish person. 

In 90s Britain – when Harry Potter was set – this number was likely to have been even less than 0.4% of the UK population. So while Anthony Goldstein in the books was likely to have been Jewish, the chances of *any* Jewish student being at Hogwarts was almost zero – because unlike North America, the UK has so few Jewish people. 

You’re basically criticising J K Rowling for writing books that don’t reflect the US population demographic, instead of the population demographic in 90s Britain (which, incidentally, was over 90% White British. If anything, non-white people are over-represented at Hogwarts). 

Don’t get me wrong, Rowling is problematic in many ways – but criticising her for not representing a population group that was extremely rare in the UK in the 1990s is ridiculous, misleading, and pretty harmful to social justice IMO. 

It also makes her critics look pretty ignorant and culturally imperialist – you’re criticising her for, well, basically, not being North American (which, frankly, she can’t help) or for not perpetuating North American cultural supremacy, when the series wasn’t even set in modern North America (and she’s never lived in North America).

And before you bother attacking me, I’m a non-white Brit who went to secondary school of 1,400 kids in racially diverse London in the 1990s – and even *I* did not meet or encounter a single Jewish person until I after I left school as an adult. And my life has had far more racial and religious diversity than the average Brit. 

But I am sick and tired of my life, and the lives of people like me, being misrepresented so some white American kids on Tumblr can scream ignorantly about “problematic” things that aren’t problematic and feel all holier-than-thou about themselves.  

If you’re going to criticise Rowling for something problematic she’s done – and there’s enough to criticise, frankly – how about you make sure you criticise her for something that’s actually true and in context, hmmm?