Even though the Harry Potter series was written way before Kanye started opening his mouth without actually consulting his brain first – although, honestly, I don’t even know if that would have made any difference – it certainly feels as though J.K. Rowling had a lengthy chat with him before creating the house-elves: slaves that can’t even bear to hear the word ‘freedom’? Who choose slave work? Who inherit the bias of their masters? That definitely sounds like Kanye’s kind of slavery.
In the books, there are only two elves that we actually get to know, Dobby and Kreacher. We get more from Dobby than Kreacher, but that’s mostly because Dobby is the American Dream of what an elf – in his right mind-ish – can be. Throughout all of Harry and his sidekicks’ interactions with Dobby, we see him as an elf who knows how to choose his masters – even when free, which is, once again, very worrying on the ideological front – and a kind elf who became Harry’s – very useful – friend. As Kanye put it, Dobby was “mentally enslaved” (H. Kaur), who even as a free elf, was very much at Harry’s disposal whenever Harry needed him.
Then we have Kreacher, an elf who is very much a jerk, and therefore ridiculously unlikable, and also like Kanye – not implying anything there, unless you want to read between the lines, which you are infinitely welcome to do so. Kreacher is the physical embodiment of his masters’ ugly and hateful biases, a hunched old little elf with a sagging face and way too much hair in his ear who spits the words “mudblood,” “blood traitor,” and “nasty little brat,” every chance he gets at anyone who is not strictly a pureblood. In the real world, we have Kanye asking people to please stop reminding him of slavery and to ignore certain important, notorious people of color, icons like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., because they are “just too far in the past and not relatable” (J. Coscarelli & R. Ugwu), which is just a subtler way of being a very ignorant Kreacher, neglecting the truths of the world they live in.
So we’re left with two very significant comparisons. Dobby and Kreacher, where Dobby is the desired slave, one who is nice and respectful and does everything with a smile on his face, demanding less holidays and a lower wage because, as he says in the book Goblet of Fire, “he isn’t wanting too much, miss, he likes work better” (Chapter 21); and Kreacher is nothing else than the opposite, who insults Sirius – his master – every chance he gets in Order of the Phoenix, calling him a “nasty ungrateful swine who broke his mother’s heart” (Chapter 6), and basically doing nothing that a house elf is required to do well. At all. And then we have Kreacher and Kanye. Kreacher having absorbed, listened to, and internalized everything that the people around him – mostly his masters – were saying, much to his own detriment; and Kanye, ignoring absolutely everything that people around him – rational people – were saying, assuring us that thinking is definitely not his strong suit. A real philosopher, that one.
In the two comparisons, we see Kanye’s idea of slavery and a warped way of the historical kind of slavery, with Dobby representing Kanye’s kind of slave and Kreacher, the unwilling slave, who does it against his will; and just how similar Kanye and Kreacher come to be, both blind to the truth around them and spewing ignorant claim after claim, hoping that the next time they say it, it will sound better. Thus creating a sense of finality in our hopes for our society to move forward and for racism to be left behind; but here we have one of the most influential book series in the lives of citizens of the world with a system of racism and slavery so absolute that the slaves can’t even fathom the idea of being free, and one of the most famous artists in the music industry belching nothing but ridiculous notions of slavery and racism upon the impressionable public. How are we ever going to be free from hate, when those who have the ears of the public say nothing of good consequence?
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