Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 187184

 
> Alla:
> Only when you think that the group to which person belongs is inferior, I think you are lying to yourself (not you, hypothetical you and  in this instance I mean Snape) that you do not think that one person of this group is inferior, I think sooner or later the bulb will go off in your head that oh no, this person belongs to this group, he or she is absolutely the same and I was deluding myself.
> 
> It reminds me of when person would say, oh I do not like jews, but my best friend is a Jew, or I do not like gays but my best friend is gay, or I do not like Black people but my best friend is black person.
> 

Pippin:
You think a person can not dislike dogs in general, but have a soft spot for one particular pooch? It's inevitable that they'll turn on that dog eventually?  

I  agree with you on your specific example, because  someone who says "Jews are inferior" is most likely being hostile on purpose. But that's in our society, where equality is a right, and expressions of bias against people are considered crude and everyone knows it.

But that's not the situation in Snape's world. When Slughorn says "You mustn't think I'm prejudiced" he really believes he isn't, IMO. When he says that it's surprising a Muggleborn would do so well, that's based on what he thinks is observable, empirical evidence. 


After all, he's been teaching for years. He doesn't know that he's not a reliable observer, or that his interpretation of the evidence is going to be skewed by his expectations. He's never heard of sensitivity training or consciousness raising exercises.

Canon doesn't play fair with us -- It shows us two utterly brilliant Muggleborn witches and the only  Muggleborn who really doesn't seem to adapt to the WW at all is Myrtle, who'd be a disaster anywhere. But does that make sense? 

 By the law of averages, half of all Muggleborn students should  struggle more than the other half. But we never meet them, so our  impression is that  Muggleborn students are obviously brilliant, like Hermione and Lily, and anyone who can't see that they're just as magically adept as any other wizard must be blinded by hate or very obtuse. 

Snape and Slughorn could see that Lily was brilliant, but they'd also see a lot of Muggleborn students who weren't, and they'd attribute their struggles to the fact that they were Muggleborn. It wouldn't take much to think that Muggleborns were naturally weaker at magic, considering the cultural disadvantages that Muggleborns face, and which Snape and Slughorn probably never thought about. I don't suppose anyone vets the OWLs and NEWTs for cultural bias. They probably never even heard of such a thing.

 So yes, Snape  learned that Muggleborns were inferior, but he wasn't taught that as a philosophy, IMO, he was taught that as a fact, like "cats are fuzzy". 

Generalizations like that are "sticky" -- if you see a hairless cat, you're likely to think it's an unusual cat, not that everything you ever learned about cats is wrong. 

It's like Lily herself, really. We were told that Lily was a heroine, and so we expected her to act like one all the time. We want to put a heroic cast on her actions even when Harry himself can't bear to watch what he knows she's going to do. We'll even go so far as to say that JKR deliberately had her act out of character in a major scene.

But JKR covered herself on that one.  Snape had already observed that Lily was acting strange: "I thought we were friends." Just speculating, but if Lily wondered out loud if Snape wasn't involved in what happened to Mary, she'd be no different than Snape refusing to believe that James hadn't been in on the prank. 

I don't think that Snape calling Lily Mudblood has to prove that he'd always detested  Muggleborns.  What, you think she called him Snivellus because she always had something against people with big noses? She called him that because she knew it would hurt.

Pippin