Sometimes I lose track of where I found a thing, and that’s the case with Nathan J. Robinson’s exploration for Current Affairs of J.K. Rowling’s literature in the face of J.K. Rowling’s bigoted personhood. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books; it’s not a genre in which I’m interested. I’m interested, though, in this sort of retrospective in light of a creator’s personal beliefs or behavior. I was surprised among other things to learn the books apparently just sort of brush off slavery as a sort of “eh, what’re you going to do” thing. Then there’s this brutal bit.
[…] I was recently reading Langston Hughes’ memoir The Big Sea, and he discusses a wealthy white woman who served as his patron during the Harlem Renaissance. She simply adored him, but she also expected him to produce a very particular kind of writing that would capture the spirit of the “savage” and “African” that so entranced her about him. When he didn’t conform to her expectations, she cut him loose. She was a racist, it is obvious to any of us, but every word out of her mouth was about how important she felt it was to support Black literature and Black people, all the writers she loved and how wonderful their art was. I hear echoes of this when J.K. Rowling talks about the charming transsexual she met.