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This is a really good example of why Socratic inquiry really works. Because the first step in analysing any media product is to look at things like age and gender and race, but the second step is to examine the underlining factors that create our biases about those very things.

A friend recently commented that she sometimes misses the days when fandom seemed like this shiny, egalitarian place where issues surrounding race (and gender, to a lesser extent) just didn't exist and she didn't realize it was an illusion courtesy of her own privilege, and it struck me how telling a comment that was: For a whole lot of people, the anger that their fandoms are being "polluted" or "ruined" by this kind of discussion stems from a deep-seated conviction that these problems didn't exist in fandom before some troublemakers started talking about them, and they view the people talking about them as the instigators of the problems rather the people who have been hurt by them or seen others hurt by them speaking up to say, "This is wrong, and it's something fandom collectively needs to work on."

Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)

such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.

we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. IT is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

The failure of the academic feminists to recognize differences as a crucial stregnth is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower.

Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.

To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.

  Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed?  He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals

Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.

Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.

But Rowling's ideology cannot simply be described as anti-racist, for as strongly as she condemns racially-motivated violence, Harry Potter remains a classic work of fantasy. And fantasy is a literary genre intent, above almost all else, on the reassuring order of classification and categorization, of blood lines and inheritances.

That is, as the authors say, "Remarkably, emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces."This finding has very interesting consequences for understanding how brains process varying degrees of complexity in images. The implication here at least is that more simplified faces become tied more explicitly to a "symbolic" meaning as opposed to their iconic meaning of resembling what they look like. That is, more simplified images strip down the meaning to its core meaning disconnected to the iconic reference that they are framed within.