Book 1 Chapter 7: The Sorting Hat
In this chapter, all of the first year students line up to take their turn being sorted into their houses, which are explained via a dirty old hat which could really stand to work on its meter and rhyme scheme. (It’s had centuries to figure this out.) Harry and the other characters who’ve been given personalities are sorted into Gryffindor, except for Draco, who lands in Slytherin. At the dinner table, the kids swap trauma stories while a “hook-nosed teacher” (so unnecessary, Rowling) looks past Professor Quirrell’s “absurd turban” (so unnecessary, Rowling) and into Harry’s eyes, sending a spark of pain through Harry’s scar.
This week I sat down with some sencha green tea and these weird mochi nugget things. They’re basically just rice and salt, but they’re weirdly addictive, even though they’ll practically glue your teeth together. I read with slight horror at the fact that the kids are immediately put center stage.
I would have been an absolute wreck being in front of the entire school at age 11. I used to have anxiety attacks weeks before doing any kind of presentation just in front of my one class; getting cheered the way Harry does would only have made things worse. Forcing all of the kids to go through this public ritual seems oddly cruel.
That said, Dumbledore and the school song reminds me of why Hogwarts was so popular. Everyone chooses their own tune to sing “Hoggy Warty Hogwarts,” which sounds like a sensory nightmare, but demonstrates that individuality is something that’s valued. When Harry asks about Dumbledore’s oddball speech, Percy tells him, “He’s a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes.” Dumbledore’s general weirdness doesn’t seem to reduce how well-respected he is, which seems to imply that outsiders are welcome here.
In truth, though, you don’t even have to scratch the surface to see that that doesn’t pan out. I briefly mentioned above how Rowling treats racialized characteristics (in Snape and Quirrell) with anything but sensitivity, and that’s just dropped in casually. Then, Neville gets into his family history; his family was so worried about whether he had magic that his great uncle repeatedly put him in serious danger to find out. This uncle dangled him out of a window and dropped him, which could have been deadly if he hadn’t turned out to have magic after all, which let him bounce off to safety.
We won’t learn in this book that someone born to wizarding parents without magic is called a Squib, although it should be obvious that such a person would be at an enormous disadvantage in the wizarding world. Life is already difficult for Hagrid, who does have magic, but can only use it secretly. In chapter 6, Harry asked Ron if his whole family was magical, and Ron answered, “I think Mom’s got a second cousin who’s an accountant, but we never talk about him.” With that, as well as Neville’s story, it should be clear that being a Squib is not an acceptable form of outsider-ness.
I think we could consider being a Squib a form of magical disability, considering how much of the wizarding world would be inaccessible without magic. I’m a bit hesitant to bring this up, because it’s a painful topic to discuss, but Neville’s story reminds me of the abuse that is often inflicted on disabled kids. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network says, “In the past five years, over 570 people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents, relatives or caregivers.”1 They elaborate:
“We see the same pattern repeating over and over again. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the ‘burden’ of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victims are disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats.”
Neville’s story easily could have been a tragedy, but he survived being dropped out of a window, and he survived nearly drowning, and it turned out he wasn’t disabled after all. No one shows any sympathy for Neville being nearly murdered on more than one occasion. The paragraph is preceded by the kids laughing at someone else’s story, so it’s apparently meant to be comedic. Immediately after it, Harry turns his attention elsewhere, so we don’t know how anyone reacts to this, but it doesn’t seem to be noteworthy to anyone.
Clearly, then, there are acceptable forms of outsider-ness—fun little quirks, mainly—and unacceptable ones. This bigotry seems to go completely unrecognized by the text; it’s taken for granted, treated as normal.
I would like to be able to just enjoy the silliness, warmth, and coziness of Hogwarts, but doing that requires looking the other way when these really egregious issues come up. This issue with Neville is an especially painful one for me, knowing how harsh the world can be towards people like me. I’ve been relatively lucky in that my family was understanding about my struggles even before I was diagnosed as autistic in my twenties, but of course that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world follows suit. It leaves me with the distinct impression that Hogwarts is not the safe place I believed it to be when I was a kid.
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ASAN: 2024 Anti-Filicide Toolkit. The foreword to this toolkit is the essay “Killing Words” by Zoe Gross, which I especially recommend.