Photo: flickr/Bharath Kishore

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The importance of Hermione Granger’s Feminist Leadership cannot be overestimated. Feminist icon and magical genius Hermione Granger plays an essential role in battling Voldemort’s forces of oppression. In part five of Harry Potter lessons in social justice organizing, Chris Crass talks about why feminist leadership is important for the success social justice organizing.

The Importance of Hermione Granger’s Feminist Leadership

I love Hermione. How could you not? She is a brilliant witch, passionate about challenging injustice, a book nerd, and she is, essentially, the catalyst who turns the anti-Voldemort struggle into a movement rooted in the aspirations, urgencies and power of young people.

She is, indeed, the Ella Baker of the wizarding world.

In book five, the situation is looking bleak. With centre right power growing through Umbridge and fascist right power growing under Voldermort, the Order of the Phoenix is on the defensive and Harry’s godfather, Sirius, instructs, “It’s up to your generation now.”

Harry primarily sees the struggle against Voldemort and the Death Eaters as his own personal mission. It is Hermione who understands the struggle must be rooted in grassroots community power.

With Umbridge preventing students from using magic in their Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, Hermione sees the opportunity to build that power. Using her relationships with students in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, Hermoine brings together 30 students to initiate a secret class taught by Harry.

Leadership is often thought of as courageous public acts by individuals — acts much like those taken by Harry. However, grassroots movements are built through the leadership of people like Civil Rights organizer Ella Baker, a pioneer who built relationships with people and who supported people to believe in their own abilities to collectively solve the problems before them.

Hermione is often thought of as brilliant, but rarely as a leader. In fact, she is one of the most important leaders in the series. Hers is a feminist leadership of building power with others, rather than over them. Hers is a leadership based in respect earned through years of building positive relationships, providing support and encouragement and consistently acting in a principled way.

Finally, Hermione’s leadership comes out of her experience of being an outsider, a muggle-born witch, who has defied intimidation when called a “Mudblood” by Malfoy, and used her outsiderness to better understand how the system works and with whom she is allied.

There is often an attempt to make leaders appear as though they were born with all the right answers.

The genius of Hermione is that she makes strong attempts to practice her politics, and learns in the process. For example, Hermoine moved to “liberate” the House Elves through Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.). The effort failed because, though her intentions were pure, Hermoine’s effort to save the House Elves was without their input, participation or leadership.

For example, Hermione could have supported Dobby’s voice and leadership in telling his own story and sharing his reasons for wanting to be free. Nonetheless, S.P.E.W. gave voice to a politics of solidarity and respect for all magical creatures. Even though S.P.E.W.’s approach failed, Hermione’s efforts matured in the process. She learned about the Ministry of Magic’s attempts to take away the Centaur’s autonomy and land, and her expression of solidarity with the Centaurs’ demands led to a critically important alliance.

Hermione routinely manifested the best big picture thinking of what’s going on, knew who could be counted on and knew how to bring people together, but these attributes alone weren’t enough to unite the students she assembled into Dumbledore’s Army.

As the students listened to her plan, doubts quickly arose about whether or not He-Who-Shall-Not-Be Named was really back. Harry ends up giving an impassioned speech about how facing off against Voldemort, with your life on the line, watching your friend die, isn’t like practicing magic in the classroom and that no one else there knew what that experience was like. The room went quiet with the heaviness of Harry’s words and then something transformational happens.

Hermione responded, “You’re right Harry: we don’t. That’s why we need your help.” She speaks on behalf of the group in a manner meant to achieve three goals at once.

She needed to convince the group that they need this underground class. She wanted Harry to understand that he in fact does need to step into this role. And finally, Hermione recognized the collective denial and fear in the room, and knew she needed to confront her own fear, publicly, so that others could do it privately.

Hermione continued, “Because if we’re going to have any chance of beating… (pause) Voldemort…” and the room is heavy once again, as for the first time someone other then Dumbledore or Harry has pushed past fear to say You Know Who’s name. Acting with the respect and legitimacy of her relationship-based leadership, Hermione spoke with vulnerable courage, her voice trembling as she said “Voldemort,” and in the process inspired others to find their own courage.

None of them doubted Harry from that moment on and Dumbledore’s Army was born. Hermione brought the students together, convinced a reluctant leader to step up and demonstrated the courage needed to build an underground resistance movement that proved key to Voldemort’s ultimate defeat.  

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Come back to rabble.ca tomorrow for part six of Expecto Patronum: Lessons from Harry Potter for Social Justice Organizing. 

THANKS: Thank you to my lovely team of fellow Order members for their editorial feedback, contributions and help: Rahula Janowski, Nisha Anand, Marc Mascarenhas-Swan, Caroline Picker, Morrigan Belle Phillips, Chris Dixon, April Caddell, Christina Aanestad, Liz Crockett Hixon and Aletha Fields. 

Chris Crass is a longtime social justice organizer and educator and author of Towards Collective Liberation: anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis, and movement building strategy.  He is a Unitarian Universalist and dreams of the day when his son, River, is old enough to go to a UU Hogwarts Camp.  For more on his book and work go to www.chriscrass.org.   

Photo: flickr/Bharath Kishore