I still enjoy the Harry Potter books. That’s probably the best place to begin. For me and many, they were a portal into something far more significant than a childhood fantasy. They were a shared language, a rite of passage, a comfort. Even now, years after the final book was published, I find a strange sense of familiarity in rereading them. But this enjoyment lives side by side with an increasing awareness of the books’ shortcomings and the troubling ideas quietly woven into their magical world. For all their charm, the Harry Potter series reflects the limitations, prejudices, and blind spots of their creator in ways that deserve serious attention.
Public discourse has narrowed in the years since J.K. Rowling’s star began to dim under the weight of controversy. Like many others, I am horrified that the author of one of my favorite book series could express such bigoted views. However, I have also noticed a growing tendency to focus on Rowling herself as the locus of all concern, a single moral figure upon whom we can pin outrage and blame. In doing so, many have settled into the comfort of moral absolutism, which refers to the belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged. She is now a villain, the author of harmful beliefs, a person whose views on gender and identity have rendered her, to some, irredeemable—a view I honestly emphasize. However, the problem with this kind of moral absolutism is that it simplifies and distracts from complex questions. Fixing Rowling as an evil person has become a way to avoid examining how and why the ideas in her work emerged in the first place. Often, it leaves out culture and background that may have made her decide to make certain decisions in her writing instead of blaming her alone; overall, it turns a cultural problem into an individual one, leaving the broader context unexplored.
Take, for example, the goblins. The goblins who manage Gringotts Bank are shrewd, secretive, hooked-nosed, and intensely possessive of wealth. These features have led many readers to recognize them as resembling long-standing antisemitic caricatures of Jewish people. This observation has been raised repeatedly, often with justified discomfort. But what is usually left out of that conversation is a deeper and far more pressing question. Why, when imagining a magical world of infinite possibilities, did a middle-aged British woman from a middle-of-the-road background imagine that this was what a banker should look like? What cultural references, conscious or unconscious, led her to equate goblins with money and give them such particular features? What stereotypes about finance and power existed in the United Kingdom during the 1990s that could be absorbed and reproduced in a children's book without triggering alarm?
The answer to that question is not just about Rowling. It is about the cultural landscape that shaped her imagination and the way that landscape reflects a much larger set of beliefs. The goblins of Harry Potter are not unusual in the history of fantasy fiction. They sit comfortably in a long tradition of European folklore where creatures associated with money and trickery bear a striking resemblance to real-world ethnic stereotypes. In Britain, stories of greedy and mysterious figures in control of hidden wealth go back centuries, often filtered through a Christian cultural lens that cast Jewish people as the Other. These associations, long divorced from their origins in many people’s minds, survive in the background noise of Western storytelling. When we see goblins counting gold in underground vaults, it often does not register as odd because it feels familiar. But that familiarity is precisely the problem.
If we are serious about confronting the prejudices in Rowling’s work, we must look at what she wrote, and the cultural currents that made such depictions feel unremarkable to readers for so long. The goblins are not a fluke or a personal tic. They are a reflection of the narratives that have been passed down unexamined. To reduce the issue to Rowling’s prejudice, it miss the much more uncomfortable truth that these ideas did not begin with her and likely will not end with her either.
This is what happens when we focus too heavily on individual culpability. We flatten the conversation into one of morality and miss the opportunity to examine systems, histories, and collective blind spots. Rowling becomes a convenient target, a stand-in for all that is wrong, and the rest of us are let off the hook. We no longer have to ask what cultural assumptions we have absorbed, what images we passively accept, or how the same forces have shaped our imaginations.
It is also important to remember that calling out these elements in Rowling’s work does not require us to discard the books altogether. Many of us are capable of holding two truths at once. We can love Harry Potter and also acknowledge its flaws. We can revisit those pages affectionately and still interrogate the stories they tell beneath the surface. The goal is not to erase the books or pretend they had no impact. It is to understand them more deeply, to use them as a mirror rather than a shield.
When we allow ourselves to step beyond the framework of villainizing one person, we open up space for a richer kind of conversation. We can begin to ask better questions about how prejudice operates, not just in Rowling’s mind but in the cultures that raised her and the societies that consumed her work without question for decades. We can investigate how harmful tropes take root and persist, often unnoticed, and how we might begin to dislodge them. We can ask what our fantasies say about our realities.
J.K. Rowling’s legacy will always be complicated, and it should be. But if our response to her work is limited to condemnation, we will have learned very little. The goal should not be to pass judgment and move on. The goal should be to understand how this happened, what it says about us, and how we might do better in the stories we tell next.
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