Photo: kats.outta.the.bag / Tik Tok / Warner Bros. Pictures
Wait until Voldemort hears about this.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Sep 16, 2021
As part of a new TikTok trend filled with unvaccinated people angry about being called what they are, they are now referring to themselves as ‘pure bloods’.
The term is often associated with world-famous ‘Harry Potter’ series written by J.K. Rowling but actually has much darker meanings and connotations — including Nazism.
Why are unvaccinated people calling themselves 'pure bloods' on TikTok?
Unvaccinated people want to be considered "pure" because they're not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
In a now-deleted video, one user suggested she had coined the 'pure blood' label for unvaccinated folk.
“We will No longer be referred to as Unvaxxed. We simply go by…. Pure blood,” she explained.
The term 'pure blood' is linked to Harry Potter.
Well, in Harry Potter it refers to wizarding families that don’t include any non-magical members in the bloodline.
However, as revealed by Sirius in ‘Order of the Phoenix’, when traced back far enough nearly every family tree had some non-magical ancestors.
A lot of the families simply pretended that these non-magical members, or Muggles, didn’t exist in an attempt to retain their ‘pure blood’ status.
Being pure blooded was very important — to those who really cared about something so irrelevant which has no effect on the wizard’s abilities.
Pure bloods were selfish, believing that those who weren’t pure blood shouldn’t be allowed to practice magic or become wizards.
There was a ‘pure blood’ supremacy of sorts — eerily similar to a certain ‘supremacy’ that falls in line with the anti-vax, radical right-wing agenda.
One person commented, "Funny thing is, most of the pure bloods from Harry Potter were selfish and did only things that benefited them. Crazy similarity to the Covid pure blood."
'Pure blood' is a term associated with Nazis and white supremacists.
'Pure blood' is also eerily similar to a historical event that occurred as a result of a certain ideology that called for eradication of a certain group of people led by a certain fascist leader who believed in a superior, ‘Aryan race’.
I’m referring to the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler. The Half-Blood prince himself, Lord Voldemort, was seeking power in order to eradicate the wizarding world of all those who weren’t ‘pure blood’.
In fact, in an interview with Dutch newspaper, “The Volkskrant,” she compares Voldemort to the fascist leader, saying “Voldemort is of course a sort of Hitler.”
The book's controversial author, J.K. Rowling has even made the connection herself, highlighting that "pure blood" ideology is not a positive thing.
In a response to a fan question on her official site, Rowling said, “If you think this is far-fetched,” referring to the ‘pure-blood,’ ‘half-blood,’ and ‘muggle born’ terms, “look at some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted 'Aryan' or 'Jewish' blood.”
Notions of being "pure blooded" has caused centuries of racism and antisemetism for marginalized communities.
Certainly, this isn’t a good look for those TikTok ‘pure bloods.’
White supremacists have latched on to ideas of purity for decades as an attempt to view other races as inferior or, somehow, unpure.
However, considering all of human kind originated from Africa, we've actually been intermixing our DNA for centuries and genetic purity simply does not exist.
In subsequent videos, the user who first went viral with the term, addressed comments that similarly equated the term ‘pure blood’ to Nazism and Harry Potter, but disagreed with the comparisons.
“If we’re really gonna compare other people’s actions to that time period, y’all are the one that’s going around rattin’ everybody out to the government,” she says in her video. “You’re also mass-reporting pages to get people to shut up so that’s lookin’ a little [raises eyebrows] as well.”
TikTok user @lastkoonkano, said that though the term was used in a racist context in the past, she is not racist for using it in this context of being unvaccinated and refusing to put “synthetic sh-t” in her body.
However the term was coined, it still has a controversial history that may not be too far from what the unvaccinated are trying to promote.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice and politics.