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mattnewport comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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It seems like a class rather than race thing to me. Maybe this is partly because class divisions are more salient to me than race divisions with my British upbringing but given Harry Potter is a British creation I think class is likely to be the the closest analogy. It's the kind of treatment that a scholarship kid from a working class background would get in a public school. The fact that Hogwarts is modeled after public schools lends weight to this theory.
I don't buy the class analogue.
Aside from the racial (magical) view being perfectly consistent with everything in canon (magical/non-magical seems to override even xenophobia, witness the foreign schools' reception in Goblet of Fire), we also have a perfect example of one group of people who suffers from both class and racial discrimination: the Weasleys.
The Weasleys are presented as being mocked (particularly by the Malfoys) both for being poor - lower class, note also that their red hair suggests Irish roots - and for linking themselves with Muggles and eventually intermarrying with Mudbloods. If the 2 were one and the same, we would not see any difference.
I can't really pretend to be much of an expert on Harry Potter - I've seen several of the movies but I've never read any of the books. From what I've seen however the parallels to class in British society are clear while the racist connotations are less apparent to me. Discrimination based on physical features common to an ethnic group seems to me to be an essential component of racism which is largely absent in the movies.
In Britain wealth and class are correlated but distinct. The concepts of the nouveau riche and the distressed gentry are examples of how the concepts of wealth and class are not identical.
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!)
In America, our classes are called races.
It's more complicated than that.