Sheep In The Box – RACIST HOGWARTS?!: JK Rowling’s DEFINITELY NOT RACIST International Wizard Lore

Is it water with the sheep in the in the Box a while ago I made a video exploring the political and philosophical implications of the World of Harry Potter I did briefly cover race on some of the missteps made over the years in that video but there’s something that’s

Been playing on my mind since then and I need to share it so I can get it out of my brain in my opinion some of the law about International Wizards and specifically wizard schools seems kind of racist is this a hot take I don’t know it’s certainly not timely or

Relevant but as JK Rowling has recently published a book that goes out of its way to claim that actually caring about harmful stereotypes and offensive representations in media is dumb and cringe and actually the real victims and all this are the billionaire authors who are victimized by the woke left

Canceling them for the things they said and did well I thought perhaps it was worth a revisit looking at it from a purely objective standpoint without any prior knowledge of its author or the discourse around her JK Rowling’s body of work has some rather concerning issues with and betrayals of minority

Groups I mean this is obvious right the single prominent black character is called Kingsley shackle bolt and the one Asian character is called Cho Chang fuck it’s like oh and let’s not forget that the person who played the character of lavender Brown was black until she was

Supposed to be dating Ron a ginger white guy and was recast and they swapped for what I’m sure are totally legit and not at all concerning reasons but yeah whatever cold take I get it I made a whole feature-length video about this ages ago but this is different see in

That video I talk mostly about the law of the actual books and movies but today I actually want to talk a little bit about the additional law added to the series by JK Rowling since the books and movies stopped being released that’s right we’re going to be taking a little

Look at some of the absolutely wild shit on what used to be called Pottermore but is now called Wizarding World to tie in with those dog shit fantastic Beast movies specifically in this video we’ll be talking about betrayals of non-white wizards and wizard culture for lack of a

Better term I mean what you think that the sort of person who signed off on Double Down on and has thus far refused to condemn shit like this and included similar though less egregious descriptions and depictions in her books and further mocks people who criticizes it could be in any way prejudiced

Towards racial and ethnic groups no that’s impossible I mean it’s not like there was a literal Star of David on the floor of gringott’s bank right that would be absurdly on the nose not to mention offensive especially if you’d contributed to the massive media blitz against the center-left political figure

Helping to smear him as anti-semitic in part because he probably would have taxed you on your literal billions of pounds or stopped you attempting to claim vast parts of Scottish Countryside as your personal exclusive property but all right let’s talk about African Wizards according to JK Rowling shall we

Taken from her writing on the same website that once asked the important question of whether or not slavery is bad and came down in the middle somehow this should be fun first off we have to talk about the ways in which Rowling actively plays into lazy but sadly prevalent stereotypes surrounding the

African continent and its people in much the same way as how goblins played into anti-semitic stereotypes about avaricious ugly hook-nosed creatures obsessed with money and who exist parallel too but in opposition to the mainstream so how does she do that well in a number of ways but let’s focus on

Two main ones one Africa as a monolith the moronic stupid idea that all of Africa one of if not the most culturally diverse places in the world is somehow a single simple monolithic culture unlike say Britain and France which are culturally distinct because um well I

Don’t want to make any accusations but I mean it seems pretty clear right two the myth of the Dark Continent the racist and ignorant idea that Africa and its inhabitants were and continue to be uncivilized and if anything benefited from colonialism due to this the classic Colonial bringing civilization to the

Savages talking point beloved of British Empire apologists like Boris Johnson or the multiple times prokary you did it being a prime example of this the second Point first then let’s read to showy although Africa has a number of smaller Wizarding schools there is only one that

Has stood the test of time at least a thousand years and achieved an enviable international reputation wagadu the largest of all Wizarding schools it welcomes students from all over the enormous continent the only address ever given is mountains of the Moon visitors speak of a stunning edifice carved out

Of the Mountainside and shrouded in Mist so that it sometimes appears to Simply float in mid-air much some would say oh Magic originated in Africa and ragadu graduates are especially well-versed in astronomy Alchemy and self-transfiguration the wand is a European invention and while African witches and wizards have adopted it as a

Useful tool in the last century many spells are cast simply by pointing the finger all through hand gestures to me this is pretty telling for start we have the magic Began in Africa part which I suppose is supposed to be a clever reference to the cradle of civilization

Paralleling the fact that Humanity by and large evolved and originated in Africa yeah pretty cute I guess but this does raise a few questions including well what the fuck does that even mean was magic invented by who why is it seemingly genetic and so on likewise we

Have to ask what the fuck is meant exactly by the wandless magic stuff now the way magic and its lore Works in what is apparently called The Wizarding World now has always been inconsistent and just made up on the Fly elements like silent spell casting for example just

Get dropped into the story in the second to last book for little to no reason and actually don’t make much sense when you think about it and zombies get mentioned offhand in book one and then actually they’re called inferior not Zombies by book five and they’re only coming about

Now but something about this wondrous Magic stuff just really rubs me up the wrong way the fact that in the Wizarding World something as basic and fundamental to the World of Harry Potter as a magic wand wasn’t some kind of universal or basic tool but instead a western

Invention and was brought over during colonialism there are so many questions this raises including what the Wizards were doing during colonialism what effect it had on them and so on but the main takeaway in my opinion is quite simply that this seems to very closely mirror if not directly represent the at

Best racially insensitive and ignorant idea that the colonizers brought civilization to the Savages as I mentioned with the indigenous people if anything actually benefiting from the centuries of brutal imperialism exploitation slavery and so on and then there’s the Africa as a monolith thing which I did make an unscripted ranty

Video about ages ago but it’s disappointing to see it still being used just a few years ago now within the Wizarding World the UK France and Russia each get their own Magic School in comparison to Africa all of Africa gets one school a single school for the entire continent the second largest

Continent by both population and land mass by the way a continent made up of 54 separate countries each with their own individual cultures languages and traditions and either the continent of Africa is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world and up to 2 000 languages are spoken there seems

Like a few issues of communication might arise in a place like a school that caters to all these people but that’s just me and of course each country contains multiple varying cultures on top of that in part because a lot of the borders in Africa were arbitrarily drawn

By the colonizing powers in complete ignorance of or apathy towards the existing peoples and cultures and the lands they held sacred or even just who lived there hence why a few of the borders are straight lines of course in Europe borders are messy and complicated because for the most part they formed

Over hundreds of years of conflict and compromise a straight line on a map is often a sign of violent repression see also the state borders over in the US and then there’s the origin of the name wagadu itself which oh boy so we’re told that the name is pronounced wagadu as

I’ve been pronouncing it which just so happens to be identical to the kingdom of wagadu the name given for the ancient garnayan empire covering what is now modern day Mali Mauritania and Senegal which for those non-geography heads out there is an area nowhere near modern day

Uganda but you know it’s African I guess alternatively it could originate from wagadugu the capital of Burkina Faso but again Burkina Faso is not Uganda and again is situated quite some distance away from it it could also be a reference to the hit song agadoo but I

Find that unlikely you can really see why people accuse rolling of being a little bit ignorant when she decided to add this bit of luck aren’t you foreign if there’s one thing voweling used to be good at before she started writing exclusively self-insert cringe fan fiction where she is the innocent victim

Of lgbtq plus people existing in public it’s making surface level hints at real world European mythology and folklore like Dobby for example being a reference to ancient Celtic legends about household Spirits a theme that applies to many of the magical creatures that make an appearance throughout the books

To the point where it does genuinely seem like this is an interest of hers though admittedly she does change or misunderstand a lot of the myths and legends surrounding these creatures the problem with this isn’t really evident within the main seven books for a number of reasons the main one being that

British and northern European folklore seems to be something Welling is relatively knowledgeable about so outside of a couple of easily made mistakes it’s for the most part pretty harmless however the problem comes in when she tries to add law test stories covering non-european folklore it tends

To not go well should we say indeed it does actually seemed like she was a little bit lost when it came to African mythology specifically a Native American folklore well we’ll get into that in a minute as a case study let’s look at the simple matter of the location of wagadu

Shall we wagadu is situated in the mountains of the Moon which seems like an indigenous story based in ancient presumably African Legend at first glance you may be shocked to discover in fact that it is not in fact the mountains of the moon is an ancient Greek term referring to a legendary

Mountain or mountain range in East Africa at the source of the Nile River of course the ancient Egyptians were a huge part of the ancient political age and a lot of people of the ancient world were curious about the source of the mighty river that gave it its prominence

And power the Nile most of the early speculation was on the part of ancient Greek geographers and indeed According to some reports it is speculated that a number of expeditions up the Nile failed to find the source eventually a merchant named diogenese claimed that he had

Found it and that it flowed from a group of massive mountains into a series of likes a common belief about rivers for an extremely long time as you may have seen on Old Maps he reported the natives called this mountain range the mountains of the Moon these reports were accepted

As true by most Greek and Roman geographers most notably by Ptolemy who produce maps that indicated the reported location of the mountains late Arab geographers despite having far more knowledge of Africa also presuming the report was fact and included the mountains in the same location given by

Ptolemy it was not until modern times that Europeans resumed their search for the source of the Nile the Scottish Explorer James Bruce who traveled to gojam Ethiopia in 1770 investigated the source of the Nile there he identified the mountains of the Moon with Mount Amma damit which he described surrounded

The source of the Lesser Abe in two semicircles like a new moon and seen by their shape to deserve the name of the mountains of the Moon such as was given by Antiquity to mountains in the neighborhood of which the Nile was supposed to rise James Grant and John

Speak in 1862 sought the source of the Nile in the Great Lakes Region Henry Morton Stanley finally found glacier-capped mountains possibly fitting darjonese’s description in 1889 they had eluded European explorers for so long due to often being shrouded in Mist today known as the wanzori mountains covering an area in both

Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo the Peaks are the source of some of the Niles Waters but only a small fraction and argines would have had to cross the Nile to reach them which seems unlikely many modern Scholars doubt that these were the mountains of the Moon

Described by diogenes some holding but his reports were wholly fabricated gwb huntingford suggested in 1940 that the mountain of the Moon should be identified with Mount Kilimanjaro despite Kilimanjaro being a solitary Mountain rather than a mountain range and not feeding the Nile at all and was absolutely ridiculed in Jay Oliver

Thompson’s history of ancient geography published in 1948 academics posting drama reaction content for decades now you’ll love to see it huntingford later noted that he was not alone in this clearly citing Sahari Johnson in 1911 and Dr Gervais Matthew later in 1963 having made the same identification ogs Crawford identified this range within

Mount abuno Yosef area in the amhara region of Ethiopia so what are we to make of this well for start it makes very little sense according to Rowling what I could do is in Uganda though this was only revealed After People accused her of being deliberately vague in order

To paint Africa as a homogenous monoculture and is shrouded in cloud and Mist which pretty much places it in the ruins Ori mountains on the Uganda side obviously but as we just established this is generally considered unlikely by most modern Scholars now obviously the immediate response to this will be

Something along the lines of what it’s just made up much like other fictional places in the Harry Potter Universe like hogsmead or whatever and that’s fine but it is a little weird that it’s widely speculated to be a very real place in the same kind of area but somehow is

Right next to it or something if anything keeping it vague would actually have been better as far as laws came and but this is just fandom pedantry in my opinion and whilst funny and kind of dumb on rolling’s part doesn’t actually make a huge difference now what is

Actually pretty disgusting in my opinion is the way that this mythological place that is the continent of Africa’s only significant contribution to the law of The Wizarding World isn’t even an indigenous African story or paying respects to literally any mythology or folklore originating in Africa of which

There is a lot but is instead based on a Greek legend that persisted throughout the ages and was exploited by so-called explorers and colonizers in order to justify their Invasion and trespass into African land during the Scramble for Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries in essence in the one opportunity rolling

Had or chose to have I guess to represent the diversity and fascinating mythology and folklore of an oft overlooked or dismissed entire continent containing countless peoples and cultures and she just chose instead to celebrate a European story about Africa rather than looking for actually legit pre-existing local folklore after

Centuries of Africans being erased from their own history and that’s just sad but in my opinion rather illustrative of the way she views other cultures for example whilst we’re here it’s worth pointing out that Joanne Karen Rowling also managed to massively misrepresent an offend Native Americans and their

Culture as well which is actually kind of impressive to be honest for start much like Africa she smashes the cultures of multiple native tribes many of which actively contradict and have histories of conflict with one another together because I mean they’re pretty much all the same right for example she

Got into a lot of hot water over basically saying that the tradition of the skinwalker was actually just stupid muggle people not understanding animation or in rolling’s own words a legend grew up around the Native American animeji that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation in fact

The majority of animejay assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe such derogatory rumors often originated with no match medicine men who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves and fearful of exposure literally just saying that native American traditions and beliefs are full of shit honestly just

Incredible stuff hilariously ignorant and of course rolling has apparently used the term Native American culture in a serious manner before basically showing her to be completely ignorant of the complexity and diversity of cultures throughout the indigenous peoples of the Americas for reference there are 574 different Native American tribes

Recognized by the US government Each of which has its own unique Traditions culture and in many cases language Native American culture probably covers them all though right just like Africa those people are basically all the same unlike France and the UK which are totally unique and deserve their own

Schools oh yeah did I mention that just like Africa the entirety of North America has a single wizard school she heavily stereotypes the Native Americans claiming that the Native American Wizarding Community was particularly gifted in animal and plant magic which some have claimed perpetrates The misrepresentative Stereotype of the

Spiritual Native American being at one with nature and of course she repeats her one less magic trick because I guess indigenous peoples were all fucking useless before the good old Europeans came in and gave them technology hey Rowling claims that the absence of a wand is the most glaring difference

Between Magic practice by Native Americans and the Wizards of Europe although apparently Native American Wizards were all capable of complexity with theirforementioned innate natural power Rowling explains they lacked the sophisticated ability permitted by a wand which originated in Europe those Savages am I right also according to

Valength this was a country with few amenities no tell us what you really think about indigenous peoples Joanne obviously this feeds into the argument and ignorant opinions of early modern colonizers who incidentally rolling whitewashers as explorers who argued that uncivilized Native Americans needed saving from themselves an idea that

Eventually led to the infamously brutal residential schools the motto of which was to kill the Indian to save the man at which a mass grave was discovered very recently speaking of schools let’s talk about over money how did it come about oh you you’re gonna like this on

What used to be called Pottermore Rowling tells the story of actually you know what I’m just gonna quote from the salon article that covered this here it’s the 17th century of issult ser a magical Irish lass who sails with the Puritans on the Mayflower to land at Plymouth Rock Massachusetts running away

To the mountain she finds a magical sidekick a pukuji she promptly names William only to stumble across three young white Colonial settlers in various states of distress and ends up co-founding a magical school with them pokuoji becomes one of the four houses of illumini each of which is named after

A magical totem animal you can now go into the Pottermore site and take a quiz that will sort you into one of the houses so no magical human natives in the story like maybe a couple from the tribe known as the Massachusetts as in the state of how about the wampano who

Populated the land nearest the Plymouth Colony Rowling never mentions natives living in the area let alone the fact that things didn’t go so well for them once the colonists stopped being grateful indeed she gives us a puck would you an anthropomorphic creature from wampano law but which in her hands

Becomes a resentful English-speaking voluntary Bond servant who refuses to tell assault his given name and so she names him William after her father together they Forge a unique friendship that sounds suspiciously like the Lone Ranger and Tonto with a dash of her man Friday precisely because it echoes stereotypes regarding good guide Indians

As interlocutors and specifically the history of tisquantum or Squanto an English-speaking Native American of the Pawtucket tribe who escaped slavery and helped the first pilgrims survive much in the same way that William the book would you helps assault by showing them how to hunt fish gather wild plants and

Cultivate domestic seeds honestly this is absolutely wild to me rolling uncritically replicates the power structures enacted by British colonialism claims that magic was chaotic until the white people show up and appropriates Native Traditions while erasing native peoples in short it misunderstands American culture geography and history and there are so

Many errors that they undermine the Integrity of the story while just playing confusing readers oh and of course many of the same issues plaguing the African wizard law also apply hair and then does the school houses oh boy so there are four main house let’s go through them shall we in traditional

Wampano culture pug wedgies are spirit-like creatures known for tormenting and murdering the people they lure into the forest in Rowling’s world this creature of folklore is instead described as a grumbling goblin-ass creature that served as the ilfamily security guards the horned serpent is considered the symbol for wisdom and

Divination in the folklore of a number of Native American tribes specifically from the Southeastern woodlands and Great Lakes regions in Rowling’s world it is essentially a shiny water snake so it has links to parcel tongue and speaks in cryptic Rhymes oh God the Thunderbird okay so originally Thunderbirds Are

Representations of strength and Majesty in a variety of stories from Ojibwe and Menominee tribes in Algonquin mythology however in Rowling’s world the Thunderbird is hardly mentioned Beyond being one of the founders of the school a white boy remember this favorite creature as you may recall from a

Previous video of mine there is actually a long history of colonial appropriating of the Thunderbird and some consider it a kind of cryptid on the same level as Bigfoot or something the Wampus is a Cherokee myth about a woman who was transformed into a half-cat half-human monstrosity and now represents the

Prophetic Spirit of death and the Earth and yet similar to the Thunderbird the legend is dismissed entirely Beyond being the embodiment of the wizard body and the other white boy’s favorite creature Christ how do you fuck up this bad the others are just kind of horrifically

Ignorant and town deaf but not to the same extent most likely because there’s less information about them they suffer from many of the same issues that plague the two we’ve just covered so I’ll be brief going over them here so as to avoid repeating myself the Japanese school mahutukuro covers all of Asia

Apparently though it pulls from pretty much exclusively Japanese culture and likewise the Brazilian one castella bruxo covers all of South America and seems to operate on the principle that South America is just jungles there’s not much more to say about it than that or at least that hasn’t already been

Said to be honest oh I guess other than the fact that the name mahutokoro is composed of the Japanese words Maho meaning magic witchcraft or sorcery and tokoro meaning Place spot or sight meaning that it literally translates as a magical place or place where magic occurs and Castello brookso is derived

From the Portuguese word Castello meaning castle and brookso meaning wizard thus literally translating as wizard castle oh and of course it being in Portuguese likely means that it was probably started by colonizers again incredibly lazy to be honest like why isn’t Hogwarts called Magic School by that logic I mean the answer is

Allegedly because European and American law gets more effort put into it because the author doesn’t give a shit about non-white cultures but people really don’t want to accept that or let go of Harry Potter at all so this will probably just continue until Millennials finally find another book so basically

When we’re all gone I guess you’re a fucking wizard I don’t think of a fuck you fat hairy bastard I’m not a fucking wizard listen Harry you’re going to go to Hogwarts and do spells and shit and you gotta be fucking pleased about it I don’t want to do your fucking spells you

Basket case sticking up your fucking dick hole tricky rolling in my opinion is a bigot and has recently just published a book admitting that she knows that but doesn’t care according to her anyone who cares or criticizes art through a modern perspective and examines potentially harmful themes or messaging in

Children’s media as a timely online mentally ill Snowflake and it’s ridiculous to claim that something using centuries-old anti-semitic stereotypes and featuring just one Canon Jewish character called Goldstein whose jewishness is never alluded to or mentioned within the text might be a touch problematic for example in my

Opinion it’s important to go back and reevaluate this old media in light of more recent Revelations and when it comes to anti-lgbtq plus bigotry well let’s be honest here it’s got a lot of overlap with other forms of prejudice transphobes usually end up also dabbling in homophobia and likewise homophobes

Are by and large not the biggest fans of non-white people and of course as you almost certainly aware by now the end result of most bigotry is the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory which means of course anti-Semitism generally such extreme bigotry is the purview of the

Far right and as it turns out many of Rowling’s fellow gender critical people and groups have received a lot of funding and support for mostly American far-right groups like The anti-gay anti-abortion Heritage Foundation and rolling herself runs a charity with a conservative baroness who openly opposes gay marriage and repeatedly voted

Against it when it was raised in 2014. funny how that works hey racism sucks racism sucks racism sucks fuck that shit fuck that shit fuck that shit I’m tired of this shit I’m tired of this goddamn shit tired of these centuries of motherfucking racism [Applause]