Wokeness Comes to Hogwarts

Spoiler alert: Snape's a Brexiter

Subscriber, I’m sure you know well the purgatorial drone of the head cold: the coughing, the dizzyness, the sniffling and snuffling. And how much louder the drone when both you and your partner are sick! Thus you will find myself and Fig these past three days, on our couch contemplating the utter inconvenience of the summer cold (our second in as many months!) and how much we’d like to just get better already so we can get on with the cheerful business of what I’ll call “summering” (i.e. writing, drawing, driving to Amish country to buy fresh strawberries, taking Mina for walks in the woods, etc. etc.)

But it’s not time to summer yet, so here we are hibernating and coughing up phlegm (sorry), and to bide the time we’ve taken to rewatching the entire Harry Potter series. Dispensing — briefly, mercifully — of the discursive shitstorm surrounding the series’ author, we have chosen to steep ourselves in some good old-fashioned Early Aughts Nostalgia. Where were you, subscriber, when it was announced which lucky boy would get to appear on the big screen as the most famous wizard in all the west? How incredible a fact is it that Robert Pattinson is in both this series and Twilight, a brooding specter haunting the millennial collective consciousness for ages to come? And let’s not forget the fact that the series included pretty much every leading light of contemporary British Shakespearean theater — Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Sir Michael Gambon, etc. etc. — so that watching these films is *almost* like watching the greats tread the boards at the Globe? (I said almost, ok?)

Naturally, being at once 1) fever-dream-y, 2) vibrating with the pent-up desire to “summer,” 3) a transsexual who is too keenly aware of The Discourse, and 4) an associate professor in the humanities (lmao), a thought occurred to me while watching these films: What would Hogwarts be like nowadays? I began to imagine a whole host of Gen Z and Gen Alpha students entering into the magicking world, and subsequently another thought occurred to me: Holy fuck, things would be a lot different.

And so a little bit of writing ensued. Once upon a time, this is the kind of thing I would have sent off to McSweeney’s and waited weeks to hear from the kindly Chris Monk about, but nowadays I am both impatient and disinclined to further flood what I know to be an already-flooded inbox. So instead, I am sending it out to you, here, in my humble little Substack. I hope you enjoy!

Simpler times at Hogwarts

An email to the Hogwarts class of 2031 and their parents from Headmaster Percy Weasley¹

Dear Hogwarts Class of 2031,

Let me take this opportunity first and foremost to welcome you all to what I know will be a very eventful – albeit safe, and non-actionable – seven years of training in the Magical Arts! We are beyond excited to welcome a new generation of witches, wizards, and other persons-of-magical-ability (POAs) to our storied Hogsmeade-adjacent campus in the Scottish Highlands. Though I’m sure you’re eager to learn more about your arrival date, the opening banquet, and our new Sorting Hat Protocol, I am going to delay that info for just a bit to inform you of some very important curricular and cultural changes we’ve implemented at Hogwarts.

When I became headmaster ten years ago, I set out to put behind me the mindless, ask-no-questions bureaucracy I’d encountered during my difficult tenure at the Ministry of Magic. I was certainly a fanatical rule-follower as a young wizard – we all saw where that got me, ha! – so I promised myself that part of my duty as Headmaster would be to challenge harmful assumptions, especially those that unfairly imperil or marginalize vulnerable POAs.

Right away, I knew there were some major changes I had to make. Growing up in the Dumbledore era of Hogwarts was a heady experience: as much as we all treasured our dear Albus, there were certain iniquities of his that, given the innocence of youth, regressive politics of the post-Thatcher 90s, and lack of access to alternative viewpoints were fairly easy to overlook. Albus’s obvious Gryffindor-favoritism was one such thing, as was his somewhat cavalier approach to the hiring of faculty (I shudder to think how a Gen Z class would react to a lecture from, say, Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody), and his at-best-clueless take on what constitutes “safety and security” at a private boarding school legally responsible for the wellbeing of literal hundreds of minors. To these ends, I instituted provisions against staff and faculty house-favoritism, implemented a rigorous screening policy for all hires (both tenure-track and non), and withdrew Hogwarts from participation in the Triwizard Tournament – that is, before it was formally dissolved in 2015 over allegations of ongoing performance-enhancing potion use at Durmstrang Institute.

Shortly after the pandemic, I was emailed a Google doc from a group of concerned seventh-years. Entitled “An Open Letter to the Faculty of Hogwarts,” the document outlined a number of growing concerns the students had about their beloved institution. At their request, I am including a significantly pared-down version here:

We, the soon-to-be graduates of Hogwarts, are conscious of the wide gulf that exists between our school and an ever-changing and diversifying magicking world. As we wish to build bridges instead of incendio-ing them, we have composed this letter as a list of even-handed requests. We hope that, in meeting them, you will be able to serve subsequent generations of magic-doers far better than you have us.

We are concerned first and foremost with the unexamined dogma of racial purity undergirding the house sorting system. As you well know, Salazar Slytherin was a confirmed eugenicist whose objection to Muggle-born students at Hogwarts went far beyond idle hypothesizing: he wrote a number of pamphlets on the topic, including an infamous text called “On the Mudblood Question” in which he asked whether “one drop of muggle blood can spoil an entire quart of wizard blood.” And while Slytherin’s outrageous views are at least discussed today, conversation of Godric Gryffindor’s blatant racism and sexism appear to have been charmed out of the discourse altogether. Gryffindor was a known womanizer whom Rowena Ravenclaw described in a letter to a friend as “handsy,” and while he claimed to oppose Salazar’s views on Muggle-born students at Hogwarts, his pure-wizard favoritism is obvious: all “true Gryffindors” who’ve miraculously pulled Godric’s sword from the Sorting Hat have been pure-blooded wizards, including the Most Famous Alumnus, whose embarrassing career as a white savior “liberal Tory” millennial MP is proof enough that the Gryffindor legacy needs to be re-evaluated. We are therefore demanding an elimination of the Sorting Hat and the house system altogether on the grounds of their problematic origins and essential unfairness.

Additionally, we are concerned that Hogwarts, which claims to be Europe’s pre-eminent magicking academy, remains enmeshed in cronyism when it comes to the retention of faculty with obviously regressive views. Severus Snape, whose time at Hogwarts predates even that of the Most Famous Alumnus, is an excellent example. Some of his potions students were shocked to find that he blogs on a website called Magic Going Its Own Way under the pseudonym “Pale and Concerned.” To date, Pale and Concerned has expressed his dissatisfaction with “woke wizarding,” insisted upon a biological basis for lupinism, referred to Jeremy Corbyn as an “unremittent guzzler of leftist Polyjuice,” and voiced his support for Brexit. These views, coupled with his self-righteous and abusive behavior in the classroom and problematic past as a Death Eater, have left many students feeling unsafe and unable to learn. As the views and behavior of Severus Snape prevent the creation of a fair and equitable magicking environment, we are calling for his immediate termination as Potions Master and the hiring of a new Potions Master who qualifies as a legally-recognized Underrepresented Entity of Magical Ability (e.g. horcruxed objects, the fully or partially undead, nonverbal lupines, chupacabras, etc.)

Our final concern regards Hogwarts’s Defense Against the Dark Arts curriculum. The name alone is outdated, and reflects a Gryffindor-centric, valor-based view of magicking that has since been shown to be profoundly sexist, anthropocentric, and pro-wizard. The fact that we continue to have trouble staffing the DADA professorship simply because Albus Dumbledore refused to invite Tom Riddle back for a campus visit years ago is a major reason for Hogwarts to rethink its curricular choices in this area. Our DADA “instructors” have been totally incapable at best and inflictors of intense emotional harm at worst: an excellent example of this phenomenon has been the Most Famous Alumnus, whose DADA guest lectures have mainly consisted of describing his extremely traumatic childhood in lengthy detail, asking us over and over again whether we’d “do the same thing” if we were all just “walking horcruxes,” lecturing on the wand’s superiority to the smartphone, and waxing poetic about his recent divorce. Because of the manner in which the DADA curriculum has been devised and the ineffectiveness of the faculty members hired to teach it, we are calling for an overhaul of this section of the curriculum. We demand that the subject be renamed the Interrogation of Problematic Magicks, that Tom Riddle’s curse be undone, and that a permanent faculty member be hired to teach it.

Without going too in-depth regarding the contradictions, factual errors, and impossibilities of some of the students’ requests, I would like to assure you that I and my staff took this letter very seriously, and have made a series of changes to our magicking community that we hope you will all find agreeable:

-       Though the Sorting Hat is on a lifelong contract with Hogwarts (and is also immortal), we have been able to abolish the house system and replace it instead with a “magicker-first” system in which students choose among a variety of bedchambers installed throughout campus based on how they’re thinking and feeling at the time of their arrival. Though we are legally required to place the Sorting Hat on the head of every incoming student, under the newly agreed-upon Sorting Hat Protocol, the Hat will issue an NCSG, or Non-Committal Statement of Goodness (e.g. “Your face card never declines, bruh” or “No cap – it’s giving rizz”) and the student is then free to choose among the variety of bedchambers on campus with or without formally taking the Hat’s NCSG into consideration. Bedchambers include, but are not limited to: Non-Wizards’ Skelechamber, Were- and Were-Adjacent Lupine Chamber, Equitability Chamber, Crux-Agnostic Chamber, Persons of Magical Ability Muggle-Questioning Chamber, and the Cedric Diggory Memorial Chamber for Good Sportsmanship.

-       Severus Snape has resigned as Potions Master as of the writing of this email, citing “differences of opinion with Hogwarts leadership” and “a desire to go my own way.” We are currently investigating a series of anti-Labour statements Minerva McGonagall has posted on her X account.

-       The DADA curriculum is being overhauled, and though we have declined to adopt the students’ proposed name for it, we have chosen a new name we hope you’ll find even better: Post-Industrialist Examination of Historically Maligned Though Potentially Harm-Adjacent Magicks, Potions, and Cruxes. We have begun our search for a tenure-track PIEHMTPHAMPC professor, and we look forward to expanding our faculty in this exciting new research area in upcoming years!  

As always, I happily await another magicking year, and am very much looking forward to sharing in the new and improved Hogwarts with you! We encourage all students and parents with any questions or concerns to email them to our school counsel, Cornelius Oswald Fudge III, at fudge.cornelius@hogwarts.edu.

Yours in fair and equitable magic,

Percy Weasley (Wizard, JD, CPA, MP, PCP)

Headmaster, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft, Wizardry, and Magicks-Not-Otherwise-Specified

1. Text-loyal Potterheads (because I know some of you still exist): this is a universe in which, instead of becoming headmaster and getting murdered by Voldy, Snape stays on as an associate-level Potions Master, neglecting his publication career and ranting online instead.