An Example of Class Warfare Lit. Crit.

In Not Out of Africa, Mary Lefkowitz wrote, "Academic freedom is the right to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline." 

Below, Monika Kothari discusses the Harry Potter heptalogy as if it were the author's responsibility to advance a social objective of hers; namely, providing laudable representations of members of a "class" for political reasons:

Most of us assume that Hermione is white because she is never presented as a racial other.*

This practice of calling for didactic art has an ancient pedigree, as when Plato carped at the world's greatest drama for portraying the amorous shenanigans of the gods, and depicted a utopia which censored the arts in the name of "the right ordering of cities and households."

This sort of motivated criticism is one of the social harms wrought by the undemocratic class warfare paradigm, which is in the business of classifying an "enemy" and roping bystanders into a "struggle." A crabbed and narrow philistine outlook.

Artistic freedom is the right to create a work according to its own shape and vision, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that vision.


(*) A larger excerpt from Hermione Granger in Harry Potter: Is she white?

Most of us assume that Hermione is white because she is never presented as a racial other. In Western culture, white is the “neutral” race. Rowling is silent about Hermione's race, and we interpret that silence as default whiteness. Of course, by that logic, Rowling's magical society is blindingly white. Harry is white, Tom Riddle is white, Ron and the rest of the Weasley clan are white, Dumbledore and Snape and pretty much all of the Hogwarts professors are white, Sirius and Lupin are white, Neville and Luna are white. There is a handful of Hogwarts students that we generally accept as nonwhite: Cho Chang, Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, and Parvati and Padma Patil. All of these characters were either explicitly described as nonwhite, or they have “foreign” names that mark them as nonwhite. For example, Cho's race and ethnicity are never mentioned, yet we don't assume that she's white. Why do you suppose that might be? (Note that Lavender Brown's race is a point of confusion. Rowling was similarly silent about her race. She was portrayed by a black actor for the first few films—until she had a major speaking role, and was recast as white. This recasting only further underscores how unreliable the films are as evidence for a character's race.)

The only other explicitly nonwhite character is Kingsley Shacklebolt, the eventual minister of magic. (To me, this is the equivalent of stuffing a legal drama with white characters and casting the trial judge as black. He's an underdeveloped black authority figure, not uncommon in popular culture.) Thus, the wizarding world appears to be a post-racial and colorblind society, one that welcomes people of all racial backgrounds. But it's also conveniently a system in which nonwhite characters are relegated to interchangeable and replaceable background roles, with minimal development and no individual character arcs.