Civil Rights in the Wizarding World in the Harry Potter Series

One of my major reading questions, as I was reading through the Harry Potter series this semester, was the question of civil rights in the wizarding world, especially as it pertains to blood status, and what I found was an intense demonization of squibs that I hadn‘t noticed before reading it this time, Argus Filch, for instance, is so embarrassed at the fact that he must hide both his squib status and his Kwikspell course from Harry and anybody else other than Dumbledore, a good job of which he does until Harry discovers his Kwikspell course in Chamber ofSecrets.

One of the other noteworthy squibs was Arabella Figg, who is generally found living among muggles in the books, and we learn that, because she is a squib, she has had this life thrust upon her, though Dumbledore has let her stay connected to the wizarding world through the Order of the Phoenix There was also Ariana Dumbledore, who, though not a squib, was suspected of being one by Rita Skeeter as though this were somehow a scandalous discovery.

Neville Longbottom, who, again, is not a squib, was scared that he may become one, that it might bring shame to his grandmother and his parents. Finally, there was the briefly-mentioned cousin of Molly Weasley, the “accountant” related to a pureblood wizard family who I suspect to be a squib, Ron, who mentions the cousin, says “We don‘t talk about him,” which is what originally spurned me on this investigation In the books, where squibs are mentioned, it often has something to do with one way or another in which they are being oppressed, but one non-book character exemplifies this trend My most valuable resource for this project came from Pottermore, as it has a detailed account of the life of a character named Angus Buchanant In the canon, the character wrote a book called My Life as a Squib, and that’s all we’ve known of him, but in Pottermore, he is immortalized as the reason wizards around the world seem to be fascinated with Scottish rugby.

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I won‘t detail his story here, but it highlights many of the plights I saw that squibs must necessarily go through in the wizarding world, My project, then, was to manufacture a squib rights movement Some of this was developed with help by Lindsey Yarborough and several others in the Monday/Wednesday Harry Potter class, with whom we filmed an interview for a fake wizarding television broadcast called Which Witch? 1 had to pick a name (I decided that Ernie Macmillan would be pompous enough to take on a champion a civil rights cause for a group of which he isn’t even a part) and we improvised some aspects of my activism, such as my leading pickets for squibs’ job security, and my writing a book.

The research is all mine, and I intend to give a similar soapbox»style monologue for the cause in class as I hand out pamphlets on squib oppression and what we can do to help change the wizarding world to make life for squibs better. I also invented a story for Ernie Macmillan that involves discovering Filch’s Kwikspell course in detention, confronting him, and then later fabricating a friendship to make him seem like he was closer to Filch than he actually was, but nevertheless he is inspired to pick out and read My Life as o Squib, which inspires him, after graduating from Hogwarts, to do “the most important work I’ve ever done”: the squib rights movement.