{"id":19382,"date":"2011-12-30T02:27:56","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T02:27:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19382"},"modified":"2011-12-30T18:07:44","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T18:07:44","slug":"19382","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19382","title":{"rendered":"Psychology Major Publishes Analysis of Racial Dynamics in the Wizarding World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.psyc.jmu.edu\/ug\/features\/christinathai.html\" target=\"_blank\">Psychology Major Publishes Analysis of Racial Dynamics in the Wizarding World<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia<br \/>\nDepartment of Psychology<br \/>\n2011-10-20<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jordan Pye<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When a fan asked her about the political allegories in her book series, <em>Harry Potter<\/em> author <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/J._K._Rowling\" target=\"_blank\">J.K. Rowling<\/a> said, \u201cI wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By exploring this idea, one senior psychology student, Christina Thai, put her love for Harry Potter to use in a comparison of how societies perceive people of mixed racial backgrounds. Her work will be published in \u201cA Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation,\u201d a compilation by students who applied concepts in the series to their own fields of study. Thai\u2019s chapter is called \u201cHarry Potter and Blood Status: A Psychological Look at Blood Stratification in the Wizarding World,\u201d which she compares the racial dynamics in Harry Potter\u2019s wizarding world to the historical relationship between European Americans and African Americans in the United States&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Thai, a native of Fairfax, Va. with a second major in biology, found inspiration for the topic during her first semester of research in the Cultural and Racial Diversity Studies lab with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psyc.jmu.edu\/ug\/people\/lee.html\" target=\"_blank\">Dr. Matthew Lee<\/a>. After studying racial identity and discrimination, Thai built upon alumnus Candace Vanderpoel\u2019s honors thesis research on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=86\" target=\"_blank\">hypodescent<\/a> among African Americans and Asians. This concept is the belief that a bi-racial person has both minority and majority race heritage, but their minority identity overshadows their majority status, so their community considers them a minority.<\/p>\n<p>Thai translated this idea to social hierarchy in the <em>Harry Potter<\/em> series, where witches and wizards of \u201cpure blood\u201d descent have a higher status than Muggles, who have no magical heritage, and the \u201cmudbloods,\u201d who have a mix of wizard and Muggle parents. Harry himself had a wizard father and a witch mother who was born a Muggle. Thai mainly focused on <em>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows<\/em>, the last book in the series where Voldemort assumes power of the Ministry of Magic and enacts laws that promote pure blood status and discriminate against Muggles and mudbloods&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psyc.jmu.edu\/ug\/features\/christinathai.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Psychology Major Publishes Analysis of Racial Dynamics in the Wizarding World James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia Department of Psychology 2011-10-20 Jordan Pye When a fan asked her about the political allegories in her book series, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said, \u201cI wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2895,125,8,394,20],"tags":[8938,8941,8940,8937,8939],"class_list":["post-19382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-campus-life","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-christina-thai","tag-harry-potter","tag-james-madison-university","tag-jordan-pye","tag-matthew-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}