Anti Semitic - Tumblr Posts
You know what? No. No, Hatsune Miku did not write Harry Potter.
J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter. And we need to accept that.
Harry Potter isn’t some pure unproblematic beacon of perfection that we can just choose to erase the scummy author from and enjoy without guilt. Harry Potter is very much rooted in Rowling’s view of the world. The blatant antisemitism in the portrayal of the goblins, the entire race of slave creatures that actually really like being slaves and Hermione’s attempts to free them are largely played off as a joke, the almost complete dearth of canon characters of color (and then when she does put canonical characters of color in, they’re… Nagini…), the complete lack of respect for other cultures (the Japanese wizarding school literally translates to “Magic Place” in Japanese, Cho Chang is not even remotely a proper Chinese name, don’t get me started on her usage of Native American folklore), the almost complete lack of LGBTQ+ characters, the “Dumbledore is gay!” baiting, the lycanthropy-as-HIV metaphor that involves one of the werewolves intentionally infecting as many people as he can, with a preference for targeting children, no less…
These are all very much present in Harry Potter. They’re not things you can just ignore. And they’re there because Rowling wrote them in.
I know you read Harry Potter as a kid and loved it. I know when you read Harry Potter as a kid you probably didn’t even notice how shitty all this stuff was. I certainly didn’t. But you can’t go back to that time. You can’t go back to when you were 10, when you were consuming this media and loving it uncritically without notice or regard for its more problematic elements. You can’t go back to being a kid again.
And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re required to wholeheartedly condemn this important part of your childhood. You can still enjoy these books while acknowledging that they’ve got some really shitty things in them. You can enjoy Harry Potter as a mature adult. You don’t have to be a kid again to like it. And you’re perfectly allowed to hate on Rowling for her shittiness, past and present, while still loving Harry Potter.
So don’t say Harry Potter was written by Hatsune Miku. It wasn’t. It was written by J. K. Rowling, warts and all.
I also would've been diagnosed as asperger's syndrome had I been diagnosed before the DSM-V came out and I didn't know this! Thanks OP!!! I did some digging and found some references and articles
https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2019/05/essay/asperger-nazis-and-children-history-birth-diagnosis
https://www.biomedcentral.com/about/press-centre/science-press-releases/19-04-18 (this one has some referencing at the bottom for further reading)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6
There are SO many articles supporting OP's point.
hey so. can we all agree to stop saying "asperger's syndrome".
the arguments have been made already for why the term is offensive to autistic people as a general whole, so i'm not going to repeat them here. what i want to focus on is the less talked about issue with the fact that we as a community still use this word.
there is literally no excuse for any person, but especially jewish & romani people, to have their medical condition named after a fucking nazi who tried to genocide their ancestors. ZERO.
and before i get a ton of people in the replies trying to make excuses, let me pre-emptively answer the most common replies i know i'm going to get.
"ohhhh no but it's sooooo hard for me to switch my language, it's only been ten years since the dsm five came out!!!!!"
boo hoo, it's hard for you to use a different word after over ten years of the dsm five removing asperger's as a diagnosis. it must be soooo much more difficult to give a single shit about jews and roma than the experiences of jews and roma who went through a genocide and are still facing violence to this day /s
"but i'm an aspie and i get to reclaim that word if i want!!!!!"
yeah, the term asperger's syndrome is offensive both to autistic people who fall under the criteria and to autistic people that don't. but do you know who else that term is offensive to? the people who went through a genocide. unless you are jewish or romani i don't want to hear it.
"but i was diagnosed with asperger's syndrome before the dsm five came out!!!!!"
see the above two points about how not continuing to glorify genocide is more important than keeping the same words we've always used for things. it's fine to say you were diagnosed with asperger's, but you do not have "asperger's", you have autism (or are autistic if that's the language you prefer).
"but i didn't know that asperger was a nazi!!!"
well, now you do.
"but naming a medical condition after someone doesn't necessarily glorify them!!!!"
would you apply this logic to literally any other field of science? if we decided to name an element after a nazi, people would rightfully be angry. people have been calling for years to rename a beetle named after a nazi. if you name a medical condition after someone, that generally means one of two things: the person was a very important and good researcher in the field, or the person was a notable person who had the medical condition. this might be a hot take, but i don't think that a nazi scientist working for the nazis should ever be considered the best and most important early researcher in any field to be deserving of having a discovery named after them.
"but you can't speak for all jews!!! look, you aren't even jewish yet, it says that on your profile!!!!"
no, i cannot speak for all jews. but i am speaking for myself when i say that all of your (general) excuses have stopped working, and that y'all need to put others' needs above your feelings sometimes. during the writing of this post, i spoke to other jews who have made posts about this before, but y'all continue to ignore jewish voices and make excuses for yourselves when it really isn't that hard to just stop saying a word.
"you're being ableist by telling me, an autistic person, how i can and cannot identify!!!!!"
i'm writing this post as someone who is autistic and would have been diagnosed with "asperger's syndrome" had i gotten my diagnosis before the dsm five came out. being autistic is no excuse for being racist, antisemitic, or any other bigotry. autistic non-jews have continuously spoken over autistic jews on many issues, including this one, and guys, it is not that hard to care about jews and roma enough to make this tiny change to your vocabulary.
i hope all of this has been enough to ward off some of the responses that i'm going to get to this post. i'm willing to engage in good faith if you're genuinely ignorant or confused, but if you have read this post, you no longer get to say that you "didn't know" that hans asperger was a nazi and that we shouldn't name any medical condition, but especially one that many jews and roma have, after people who committed genocide.