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

[wynnleaf]

No: HPFGUIDX 170214


> Magpie:

> 
> 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.

wynnleaf
I wasn't really sure what I wanted to use as a quote from you Magpie,
so I just chose this one.  I generally agree with your posts, but I
don't agree on this post.  Yes, a person of 15 or 16 should be quite
aware that "mudblood" is a very offensive word and is often used by
those with a pureblood ethic.  

But adolescents, and even adults, very, very often call people things
which they don't actually think that they are, simply in order to hurt
them.  The more they want to hurt, the worse word or insult they may
use.  I have teenagers in and out of my house and occasionally when
one gets quite upset, he/she will call a good friend and even a
sibling something quite offensive.  However I am quite confident that
they don't actually believe the things they are saying.  They don't
use those words or insults because they *believe* them, but because
they want to cause a verbal injury.

I can't even begin to think of the number of times as a teenager I
might have called an intelligent person "stupid," never at all
thinking that they were stupid in the slightest.  And that's just a
mild printable example.  I once -- and only once -- called a person of
another race a very offensive name.  I had *nothing* against that
person's race at all.  It was a person close to me, and I wanted to
hurt their feelings and I knew that would get the job done faster than
anything I could think of.  I was an adolescent using a meanspirited
comment to hurt, not because I had any disdain for that person's race.
 And, by the way, the victim of my verbal nastiness knew exactly what
I was doing and told me off to the point that I will always remember
it.  But it had nothing to do with my thinking racist thoughts, any
more than my calling someone "stupid" has to do with my thinking
they're beneath me intellectually.

Magpie
> 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. 

wynnleaf
Yes, the *rhetoric* can be characterized as such, but one can not
therefore say that the speaker is necessarily bigoted in order to use
it -- no more than a person who calls someone "stupid" is an
intellectual elitist, or a person who uses a French curse is
necessarily French.

wynnleaf