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harry potter - What Percentage Makes Someone a Half-blood?


I was checking on something in the Harry Potter wiki and saw Harry listed as "Half-Blood." Both his parents were magical, but, as we know, his grandparents on his Mother's side were muggles. This reminds me of the racially loaded terms like octoroon. (In the south, you still hear those terms every once in a while.) When there was still segregation, having only 1 great-grandparent of an ethnic group was enough to classify a person of that group.


So how far down the line did it go in the Harry Potter universe? Just how many generations removed from a muggle-born would a person have to be before they're no longer classified as half-blood or something similar?



Answer



As per J.K. Rowling herself:





Why are some people in the wizarding world (e.g., Harry) called 'half-blood' even though both their parents were magical?



The expressions 'pure-blood', 'half-blood' and 'Muggle-born' have been coined by people to whom these distinctions matter, and express their originators' prejudices. As far as somebody like Lucius Malfoy is concerned, for instance, a Muggle-born is as 'bad' as a Muggle. Therefore Harry would be considered only 'half' wizard, because of his mother's grandparents.


If you think this is far-fetched, look at some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted 'Aryan' or 'Jewish' blood. I saw one in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the 'pure-blood', 'half-blood' and 'Muggle-born' definitions, and was chilled to see that the Nazis used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters. A single Jewish grandparent 'polluted' the blood, according to their propaganda.



Therefore, as per JKR, the official Third Reich formula-like rules were in effect:



In Germany itself, the Ahnenpass and Nuremberg Laws classified people as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood". (source)




Of course, as usual, the bosses got to make any exceptions they wanted - e.g. Voldemort was certainly not considered "half-blood inferior" by his own rules. Same as with Nazis - quoting my completely unrelated answer on Skeptics.SE:



These events (Erhard Milch being issued a German Blood Certificate) prompted Hermann Göring to say famously "Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich" ("I decide who is a Jew")



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