Imaginary Worlds - Dumbledore's Army

Episode Date: November 17, 2016

How much does an author's point of view influence her stories? And do those stories in turn influence us? Professor Anthony Gierzynski argues that reading Harry Potter can make people more tolerant of diversity, and more resistant to unreasonable authority. Andrew Slack, creator of the Harry Potter Alliance, explains how JK Rowling inspired him to want to change the world. And the HPA's Jackson Bird explains how being a political activist changed him in ways he never expected.  ** This is part 6 in a 6-part series on magic and fantasy.**Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. In 2008, J.K. Rowling was invited to speak at Harvard's graduation ceremony. She was charmingly self-deprecating, as usual. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners, and convince myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion. I've been watching a lot of interviews with J.K. Rowling

lately, and I've just been so impressed by how humble she is. I mean, we all know her backstory. She was a single mother on welfare before she became the most successful writer in the world. But that day, she talked about a very humbling experience she had in her 20s, working at Amnesty International in London. This was right around the time she started imagining Harry Potter and started brainstorming how the story would play out. And working with Amnesty influenced her thinking about Voldemort and his minions and what kind of oppressive system they wanted to implement. Every day I saw more evidence about the evils humankind would inflict on their fellow

humans to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read. And yet, I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Now, I've always believed that whatever influences an author going into their work comes out the other side. If we're open to it, if we're absorbed in the narrative, we may not know exactly what specifically influenced them, but we'll feel what they felt. We'll feel their hopes and their fears just at the frequency that they were feeling them. Now, Jack Krasinski teaches political science

at the University of Vermont, and he studies something very similar, how politics gets embedded into fiction. There is a theory called narrative transportation theory that argues that when we really get immersed in a story, we're not really counter-arguing things we've come across. Our defenses are down and we walk away with some of the lessons and values and perspectives that are in those stories. It's an interesting field because politics is so toxic today. People are really distrustful of the mainstream media. But politics and fiction can pass through those psychological firewalls. And he was particularly interested in Harry Potter because it wasn't just a one-off book.

You have a generation of people who aged in real time with the characters. And he had the perfect group to test his hypothesis, his own students. We came up with different ways to measure fandom and exposure to the Harry Potter series. We borrowed survey questions that were tested and used in the discipline of political science to measure some political values like political tolerance or authoritarianism. So now in your survey, you obviously can't say, are you a bigot? Are you tolerant of other people? So how do you test for that kind of thing in terms of the, how do you craft those questions? No, you don't ask people directly. What you do is, for example, on your acceptance of diversity,

what we did is we identified some groups that had been discriminated against and that were the target of animosity in society. And then we asked people to, on a feeling thermometer, say how warmly or coldly they felt towards those groups. Two other academic papers confirmed his findings. Two other academic papers confirmed his findings. There was a study at the University of Pennsylvania that tested whether Harry Potter readers reacted more negatively to Donald Trump and his talk about Muslims and Mexicans. They did, although some Trump supporters were offended because they like Harry Potter too. But there was another study in the UK and Italy that took a very different approach.

They didn't quiz adults who read Harry Potter as kids. They measured how Harry Potter affects kids who are reading the books in real time. One group has read passages that showed the value of tolerance and acceptance of diversity, and another passage that didn't have that, and they found that those passages actually caused greater tolerance among the children and acceptance of diversity. Now, J.K. Rowling has been criticized for not featuring enough minority characters in prominent roles. But Jack says the book's lessons on diversity are mostly told through metaphor. I was fascinated by Professor Lupin and that he was in the closet as being a werewolf, and what kind of effect that could have.

And there were some parallels about that tied into some research on tolerance of homosexuality that really followed the story of Professor Lupin, including, like, if it gets out he's a werewolf, he won't be able to teach in the school kind of thing. It was the same thing for the gay community in the past in terms of having to stay in the closet, you know, if they were teachers or so on. And then in the end, he did follow-up interviews to ask if the test subjects agreed with the findings.

They did. A student who was from a high school in Texas told a story of how her high school had banned Harry Potter, had banned the series. It was not allowed in the school or in the library. They learned the lesson from that challenging, unreasonable authority, and they basically formed their own Dumbledore's Army and figured out ways to thwart the ban on Harry Potter.

Dumbledore's Army was the name of a makeshift class that Harry Potter taught his fellow students in their downtime because their defense of the dark arts teacher was evil and not teaching them anything. Elizabeth Gumnior teaches literature, including Harry Potter, at James Madison University. You might remember her from my episode on the Sorting Hat. She thinks the creation of Dumbledore's Army is a really important moment in the series.

Dumbledore's army is a symbol for empowerment and action. And I think we see a lot of that in the students' attitudes towards volunteering, towards alternative spring break. And I think Dumbledore's army is a symbol for the students can be teachers. But does this play out in real life? Are Harry Potter readers actually organizing in putting their time and energy towards making the world a better place?

Yeah, some of them really are. After the break, the Harry Potter Alliance tries to save the world. All right, so first of all, I love your job title. Tell me what your job title is. My job title is the Director of Wizard-Muggle Relations for the Harry Potter Alliance. Yeah, and how's that going, the relationship between muggles and wizards these days?

Oh, you know, it's pretty good. I think it could be a little bit tighter, you know, maybe a little bit more trust now. Unlike the Minister for Magic, Jackson Bird does not have to tumble through a fireplace to communicate with muggles. He uses the Internet for most of his work with the Harry Potter Alliance, or HPA. They organize fans towards causes like preserving net neutrality and community service like donating books to libraries. preserving net neutrality, and community service like donating books to libraries. Jackson first learned about the HPA in 2010 after there was a massive earthquake in Haiti.

They did a big campaign called Helping Haiti Heal. And the thing that really caught my attention was the fact that they brought together a ton of YouTubers, young adult authors, every like fan site personality, just all of these people who I had been following separately. And I didn't know they all knew each other. And then I just got to see like all of these people that I looked up to coming together for really good cause. The person making all that happen behind the scenes was Andrew Slack. He founded the group in 2005. He just graduated college when his younger friends were urging him to read Harry Potter.

The kids got me, they just wore me down. And I picked up the book and read the first chapter of the first book and something shot through me. And I felt this book just changed my life. And when he read that J.K. Rowling had worked with Amnesty International, it made total sense to him. Because you see Sirius Black and all the discussion around how he was denied habeas corpus, which is such a huge issue at Amnesty, and how there's prison torture in Azkaban, such a huge issue in Amnesty. And I began mapping these parallels out. And then when I looked at the Harry Potter fan community, I was in disbelief that no one was doing anything about these parallels. They were doing incredible things.

They were they were doing music through Wizard Rock. They were doing sports through Quidditch. And it was incredible. But then I asked the Harry Potter fan community, if Harry Potter were in our world, wouldn't he do more than simply talk about how awesome it is to be Harry Potter? But he was creating a nonprofit organization based on a set of characters that he did not own the rights to. And he kept wondering, would J.K. Rowling be OK with this? A few years later, she was asked about the Harry Potter Alliance during an interview.

And I was with my then girlfriend, who actually was one of the co-founders of the organization. We were at a mall and I said, can you watch my things? And she said, sure. And I ran through the parking lot of the mall screaming expecto patronum at the top of my lungs. I mean, it's possibly the nerdiest thing that anyone could do, but J.K. Rowling had just talked about us in Time Magazine

and had mentioned us on her website and telling us that we're awesome and it felt amazing. And with time, I began to become more afraid. What happens if we don't, what happens if we upset her? This was put to the test as well. Andrew found out that the Harry Potter chocolates were being made with unpaid child labor. So the HPA partnered with another organization called Walk Free to pressure Warner Brothers to change the labor production on their chocolates. People told us, don't do this. You know, you've got the favor of J.K. Rowling. You should go to Warner Brothers for money. But when a member of ours said to us about the realities of

deforestation when it comes to the cocoa trade, economic slave wages and child slavery, we felt we had to do something. It's pretty weird if people are eating Harry Potter chocolate that's made by kids their own age who have been kidnapped and are slaves. So we went on this crazy path, and after six years, we ended up winning. And that did involve some help in the background from J.K. Rowling. For a long time, Andrew was the face and the voice of the Harry Potter Alliance. And he liked it that way. And then he met Jackson Bird. You know, normally I'm used to young people trying to imitate me when they speak about the Harry Potter Alliance.

Jack never tried to imitate me, ever. I mean, like, the idea of imitating me was ridiculous to him. You know, he would make fun of me saying, you don't know anything about Tumblr. How do you know anything about fandom? And I would look at myself and be like, wait, he's right. I don't. And here you got Jack staying up till two or three in the morning on Tumblr just because he wants to, like falling asleep on Tumblr. So they put Jackson to work posting videos on YouTube and they were a hit.

So they put Jackson to work posting videos on YouTube, and they were a hit. And through that, that was the first time that I started kind of gaining a little bit of a following and realizing that, like, oh, there are people who actually, like, listen to what I have to say and will support the goofy things that I want to do online. But they had no idea that Jackson's personal story would become a part of the organization and its identity. Andrew Slack won't stop texting me about what a beautiful human being Daniel Radcliffe is. This is one of their first videos. Good morning, VEDA. Hello, it is April 2nd, the second day of VEDA, and I am not quitting the Harry Potter

Alliance. I am not moving to Los Angeles. I did not book a role in a pilot, and Draco Malfoy did not hack the Harry Potter Alliance's social media. Now you recently came out as as trans on YouTube and everything. Do you feel like is there any connection to your work with the HPA and the way that you came out very publicly and with lots of community engagement? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, if I weren't working for the HPA, it's possible I would have been able to be a little bit more stealth in my transition and in coming out. I was in a slightly unusual place. You know, a lot of trans people, less and less these days, which is great just because the world's being more accepting.

But a lot of trans people, you know, when they come out, they they might move, get a new job, like just sort of leave their old life behind because that's easiest because of all the discrimination and sort of dysphoria that you'd face. But with me, with such an extended professional network and with a lot of my life being out there online, that really wasn't an option. I am transgender. This is the coming out video from 2015. Yep. Okay. Set it on the internet now. So that's that. Can't put that smoke back in the jar. Cool. Break open the gummy bears now. Did the hard part. Now I'm hungry. Everyone's gonna stop watching now anyways. I already had been kind of making videos, uh, so I guess sort of to soothe the fact that I wasn't ready to come out yet.

I was making a lot of LGBT-oriented videos for a couple of years and had been getting a lot of messages from people about how much those videos helped them. And both from that response and just from knowing how much I could have used more trans role models when I was growing up, I knew it would be worth it in that way to be able to help out more people. And I think, you know, what I've learned from the Harry Potter Alliance in becoming an activist and realizing the importance of sharing personal narratives and the power of story, that definitely sort of helped me, like, grow the confidence and strength to be able to go forth and be so open and personal about this part of my life. this part of my life. There's one really powerful video where Jackson reads a word from a poem every day during his first year taking testosterone. In the last stanza, he recaps the whole year with a condensed timeline. 365 days or 365 words. Now before all that happened, Jackson had come out to his boss, Andrew Slack. And that was such a big deal for Andrew that he's writing an essay about it, and you read some of it for me.

So to set the context, Andrew had always considered himself very progressive on gay rights. But he admits that he had a blind spot on transgender issues. He thought transgender people had some kind of personality disorder. So we get into arguments about transgender issues with Jackson, who was called Lauren at the time. And Andrew thought these arguments were purely intellectual. And at one point, he confronted Lauren, who he saw as a young woman with long blonde hair, and said, how can you speak for trans people? You're not even trans yourself. and said, how can you speak for trans people?

You're not even trans yourself. Lauren looked at me and said, because I'm trans. For a moment, I thought that Lauren was clearly joking. I almost began to smile. But Lauren's steely expression showed there was no humor. I almost fell out of my chair. I had known Lauren for three years. We went to conferences together.

I had been mentoring Lauren. I'd cried to Lauren after my father had had a stroke. Lauren was one of my very close friends. How could I not know that Lauren was trans? But it suddenly made sense why Lauren cared so deeply. I looked up at Lauren and said, are you being serious? Yes.

You're trans. Yes. serious? Yes. You're trans? Yes. Seriously? Yes. Suddenly, every transphobic thing I had ever thought or felt went out the window. I asked, how long have you known? He said, a long time. I asked, what keeps you from coming out?

He said, I'm terrified. I wanted to hug him so deeply and hold his hand. What can I do to help you feel safe? He said, what you're doing right now. When Jackson finally uploaded the coming out video, Andrew was so impressed, he began to wonder if it was time for him to step away from the organization to pass the baton to the next generation.

Yeah, it was watching that video, that sealed the deal more than anything else. It was, all right, this is going to be fine. They're going to be great. Figuring out how to continue the balancing act of who I feel I am and who society tells me I should be has become harder and harder as I've started my professional life.

Meanwhile, Jackson learned that Eddie Redmayne was talking about Jackson's video when he was promoting The Danish Girl, where Redmayne played a trans woman. Of course, Redmayne is also starring in the new Harry Potter prequel, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. So this is him on the press tour for The Danish Girl. Looking around Potter things and I found Jackson coming out, which was just wonderful and funny and powerful and passionate.

That's a great video. It was very surreal. And there's definitely, you know, there's a lot of controversy about cis men playing trans women in movies. So it was nice to see that even though he was a cis guy playing a trans woman, and that's not the ideal, he was at least being counseled by a lot of trans women.

And then it was really cool for the Harry Potter community as well to see that he was diving so deep into the fandom to do his research on that community, which frankly is not even too relevant to his role as Newt Scamander. So that's pretty cool that he really wanted to be able to see what the kind of conversation in those two communities was like and do them justice. There's actually a large overlap between those communities. Jackson says 40% of their members don't identify as straight and 14% identify as trans. It could have a little bit to do with me,

but I mean, I think it could also just be not even like me being visibly as trans, but, you know, myself and some of my co-workers early work on making sure that we were always using inclusive language. They came out early for marriage equality, which was controversial within the organization. They also set up a Protego campaign to create safe spaces for LGBTQ members. Protego is the name of the protection spell in the Harry Potter books. I find it interesting that Jackson Bird and Andrew Slack poured their energy into the Harry Potter Alliance

because they wanted to make a difference in the world. But that work also changed them and challenged them in ways they never expected. And that makes sense to me because stories about magic are often about change and transformation and not accepting the world as it appears. Mrs. Weasley teaches Harry in his first magical lesson at the platform of 9 3 quarters that there is no such thing as a wall just being a wall, that every wall carries within it a secret doorway. And if you allow yourself to find it,

you will go through it. And Harry, he runs through that wall, the barrier platform nine and three quarters, and he comes out to the Hogwarts Express and he's on this magical journey and this magical adventure. And throughout the entire story, we're seeing magic, the proficiency of magic being expressed in this notion around finding the doorway in the wall, the doorway to get to the Sorcerer's Stone.

And there are many to get to the Sorcerer's Stone, the doorway through the Chamber of Secrets, the doorway to get to the Ministry of Magic Department of Mysteries. And then finally, the doorway between life and death. And when Harry crosses that one, he ends up back at King's Cross Station. I have to admit, when I first came across the HPA, I was a little skeptical. They just seemed like such earnest do-gooders. But after talking with them, I came away really humbled and impressed. And then I remembered I was part of an organization like this. After high school, I worked for City Year, an urban peace corps in Boston, which is now franchised across the country. I couldn't believe I forgot that. I felt like Robin Williams in Hook, remembering, oh yeah, I was Peter Pan. Now City Year is still

going strong, and I hope that 20 years from now, the Harry Potter Alliance is thriving as well. But no matter what, the words of J.K. Rowling will continue to resonate, because there will always be kids who haven't read Harry Potter yet. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice, if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless, if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we

need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better. Well, that is it for this week and my series on magic and fantasy. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Jackson Bird, Elizabeth Gumnior, Jack Krasinski, and Andrew Slack, whose new organization is called Imagine Better, based on that speech from J.K. Rowling. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emulinski.

You can also support the show on Patreon and get access to a Dropbox folder where I put extended versions of each interview. I have a link to that on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. I love you.