I don't care about HP, but it's just a standard fairy tale. I read the books to my kids. Stories about knights, kings, princesses, super heroes...pretty much any story in which a normal person can fantasize about being someone who has much more power than they do, have been the stock-in-trade for story-tellers forever. Harry Potter lives a terrible life with his abusive relatives until he gets whisked off to a fancy private school where, it turns out, he is pretty special. Does it glorify the British class system? Sure, in some ways. But, it also undermines it insofar as Harry's friends are mostly from the lower classes, and the villains are mostly "old money" and those who are obsessed with genetic purity. Also, the entrenched authorities like the Ministry of Magic are shown in a rather poor light, with their dementors, cruel bureaucrats, and insanity-inducing prisons. Hermione is meant to symbolize someone who got to Hogwart's based on ability, not birth or connections. So, the story is at least partially about the transformation of the old structures of power from being based on money and birth to being based on ability. It shows British power structures in transition, I would say. What do you think?

Once I found out that Harry Potter glorified the British class system by having it take place at an elite private school where people less privileged than them are looked down upon and even called names I was already turned off

Do the books glorify that, though? I seem to remember that only the blatantly evil characters thought like that.

Granted, the last 3 Harry Potter books I read were all Methods of Rationality, so perhaps my understanding of canon is too good.

Hogwarts is not elite. Anyone can enrol if they have magical ability. It's addressed in a later book that attendance is not mandatory but nearly every witch and wizard in Britain is educated there. It's just a school that doesn't even have an admittance exam.

That's the thing that makes everyone defending this shit so sus. Harry Potter has so. many. layers. of terrible shit in it. Maybe people didn't realize it when they were reading the books as a child because they were young and naive, but as an adult you should be able to recognize shit like the only Asian character being named "Cho Chang" and realize you're reading an awful book written by an awful person. The fact that people know about Rowlings bigotry and still read HP to their kids blows my mind. If we all just agreed she was a shitty person and stopped passing her garbage writing along, she'd be forgotten in a generation.