Snape - a werewolf bigot?? Was: Say it isn't so Lupin!!!

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 170207

> Toonmili:  You can take him calling Lily a mudblood like an 
accent.  If you are an American and you move to England when you are 
young.  What will happen?  There is a great chance you will pick up 
the accent.  But once you go back to America, slowly the accent you 
picked up will start to melt away.

Magpie:
You can't take it like an accent at all. An accent is no indication 
of ideas or feelings. You don't "pick up" something like this the 
way you do an accent, you have to choose to repeat it. What Snape 
would be picking up was being comfortable with referring to other 
people in this dehumanizing way--and Snape was old enough to 
understand what he was saying. That's a lot more serious than 
getting used to calling an elevator a lift or starting to 
drop "dude" into your sentences.

Sure different people are going to have different relationships to 
the words. For instance, if in later life Draco Malfoy changed, his 
Pureblood rhetoric would probably be more habitual than it would for 
someone like Snape because he did grow up having it shape his world 
view. He would probably have more chance of it being more automatic--
it might be more of a fundamental change on his part. But no one 
seems to doubt that Draco's use of those words have meaning, that 
they stand for a certain attitude, whichever way he relates to it. 
He may have learned it from his parents, but it's not just like an 
accent, which has no ethical implications. If he changed, he would 
be expected to make the effort to stop using the language. As 
Dumbledore says, the word matters. (Which Draco himself knows--his 
own use of the term doesn't just "slip out." He uses it to get the 
reaction he wants, and to make the point that he wants. The first 
time he refers to Hermione it's by her name; his father then calls 
her "a girl of no magical family" to insult *him* and the next time 
he sees her he chooses to call her a Mudblood. It's not accident.)

If Snape no longer has those beliefs then he has changed--even if 
it's just a case of him no longer choosing to use the words for the 
effects he wants. It didn't just melt on and melt away, no more than 
Snape just fell in and out of the Death Eaters. He chose to go in 
and chose to get out. There may be teenagers who experimented with 
this kind of rhetoric once or twice and really didn't have an issue 
with it, but Snape doesn't seem to be one of them, as he became a DE.

Toomli: 
> This is like being in Slytherin.  He picked up some of their 
qualities when he was in that house.  They were his only friends so 
he was maybe talking like them because of it.  But once he got out, 
either by a friendship with people with different opinions or 
something like that, he changed the way he spoke.  Hence the reason 
why we have never seen adult Snape use the term. Being around 
Dumbledore would have some effect.

Magpie:
But a person's opinions mean something about who he is. If Snape 
started using those words because he heard them in Slytherin he 
would still need to want to use them himself--his use of the term in 
the scene in the Pensieve is a choice. He understands what it means. 
Similarly, I think the effect of being around Dumbledore and 
changing because of it would indicate that Snape saw a different 
type of person that he wanted to be. He'd changed his view of the 
words and whether or not he wanted to use them. Otherwise one might 
as well say that if Snape spends a few weeks with the DEs in the 
next book he might start saying Mudblood again (and not just to 
appear to be a DE undercover) and it doesn't say anything about his 
beliefs when of course it does. 

If Snape made a mistake as a teenager, in his mind, and did start 
behaving like Pureblood supremists or agreeing with them, I think he 
made a conscious desire to change that. 

Toomli:
> 
> Besides we know Snape is not a bigot because he told Bellatrix 
that he thought Harry might have been a new Dark Lord who he could 
pledge  his loyalty to. It is well known that Harry is halfblood  
(JK said  all grandparents have to be wizards to be considered 
pureblood) and he is even the son of the said person he thought 
blood was so dirty  before.  The point is Snape does not take blood 
seriously.

Magpie:
Whatever Snape believes now, believing Harry might have been a new 
Dark Lord is not an indication he isn't a bigot. Apparently the DE 
children all grew up being told the same thing. Snape himself says 
that the DEs believed this about Harry, and they all knew who he was 
too. 

Toomli: 
> What we heard was just a teenager trying to fit in and trying take 
focus off the fact that everyone had seen his nasty underpants.

Magpie:
By calling a girl in his class a Mudblood. That has implications in 
itself. And where is Snape trying to "fit in" in that scene? It 
seems to me he's saying something he knows is socially unacceptable, 
knowing that it will shock. Snape is using the word exactly the way 
Draco does. He's using it as the insult it is, not just mistakenly 
thinking Mudblood is a synonym for Muggle-born or Girl I Don't Like. 
He's declaring himself as fitting into a different group than the 
one that's surrounding him.

As I said, I know that different people can say things for different 
reasons, but I don't understand the explaining away of clear bigoted 
rhetoric as anything but bigoted rhetoric. Whatever the reason, the 
person is doing it. I've heard similar things, actually, for Blaise 
Zabini. He himself casually introduces the word "blood traitor" into 
a conversation and yet I've more often heard this interpreted as a 
sign that Blaise *doesn't* hold bigotted beliefs than I've heard it 
interpreted as any proof that he does (maybe the people who think he 
is being bigoted just think it's self-evident). Blaise, too, is said 
to be trying to fit in, or is driven by the mere presence of Malfoy 
to use the word to protect himself, or worried about his status due 
to some obscure part of his heritage or any number of things. I 
think when an author chooses to have a character use bigoted 
language, it's a character choice to say something about the 
character.

Whatever Snape's real philosophical position on Muggleborns is, in 
that scene he chose to say something bigoted. And in Snape's case, 
lest we forget, he later also decided he was okay with joining the 
DEs, Voldemort's elite. That, too, has often been explained as being 
about things other than primarily his dedication to Pureblood 
rhetoric, and that's quite possibly true. But even if joining the 
DEs doesn't mean that belief in Pureblood superiority is your 
*primary* motive, you still have to be okay with it. Snape as an 
adult has never used the term Mudblood and he's no longer a DE 
(err...unless he is), but this stuff is part of his past. His choice 
to use use the word in that scene to me seemed like an indicator of 
the wrong path he was starting on. It wasn't a one time thing for 
Snape or an adolescent phase--he became a DE. That's part of his 
story. 

-m