I think it may be a bit of both. A large part of the negative sentiment towards muggleborns seems to come from the purebloods viewing them as interlopers into a superior culture that has no place for them, for which the nouveau riche are the perfect analogy. But at the same time, the conflict has a great deal to do with ancestry and heredity; Voldemort and his coterie, evil bigots that they are, want to stop the muggleborn outsiders from diluting their superior bloodlines, a clear echo of various racist ideologies. The tie is made even more explicit by Rowling’s depiction of Grindelwald, Voldemort’s predecessor as a Dark Lord and pureblood supremacist, who has a biography that carefully echoes Adolf Hitler’s. Rowling is sometimes unsubtle.
(Disclaimer: I’ve read an embarrassing amount of fanfiction, and have sometimes been known to confuse canon and fanon.)
This is true, and the blood-purity issue is not entirely analogous to race. But Rowling went to quite a bit of effort to line her bad guys up with the Nazis. (Grindelwald ended up imprisoned in a place called Nurmengard, even!)
I think it may be a bit of both. A large part of the negative sentiment towards muggleborns seems to come from the purebloods viewing them as interlopers into a superior culture that has no place for them, for which the nouveau riche are the perfect analogy. But at the same time, the conflict has a great deal to do with ancestry and heredity; Voldemort and his coterie, evil bigots that they are, want to stop the muggleborn outsiders from diluting their superior bloodlines, a clear echo of various racist ideologies. The tie is made even more explicit by Rowling’s depiction of Grindelwald, Voldemort’s predecessor as a Dark Lord and pureblood supremacist, who has a biography that carefully echoes Adolf Hitler’s. Rowling is sometimes unsubtle.
(Disclaimer: I’ve read an embarrassing amount of fanfiction, and have sometimes been known to confuse canon and fanon.)
Ancestry and heredity are a big part of class in Britain (and some other cultures with a strong class or caste element) but are not about race.
This is true, and the blood-purity issue is not entirely analogous to race. But Rowling went to quite a bit of effort to line her bad guys up with the Nazis. (Grindelwald ended up imprisoned in a place called Nurmengard, even!)