Do you believe Snape was prejudiced against muggleborns in his teens? I want to believe he was but there are just several facts that don't allow it. For example- He called himself the Half Blood Prince indicating that he was proud of his half blood status. But if he hated muggleborns for having muggle parents or having 'dirty' blood, then why was he so proud of his blood status. Shouldn't he have hated it like Voldemort did?
I believe that Snape’s experience with prejudice was decidedly more complicated than someone like Lucius Malfoy’s or Bellatrix Black’s would have been. Importantly, although Ron does tell us that a larger majority of witches and wizards were either half-blood or possessed some degree of blended Muggle and magical heritage due to the sheer fact that the magical community consisted of a significantly smaller population than the non-magical and there was no way around inter-mingling with Muggles if they hoped to preserve their society (in fact, I would theorize that some of the “eccentricities” and emotional instabilities that we saw from some of the pureblood families were the byproducts of too much inbreeding as a result of a small pool of pureblood families marrying into each other again and again), I would argue that Snape would still have entered Slytherin at a distinct disadvantage.
Significantly, we lack sufficient information on the Prince family to definitively argue whether they were even a pureblood family (if so then it would seem they weren’t counted among “The Sacred Twenty-Eight”) or not and while it has become a popular fanon theory that the Princes were a pureblood family, akin to the Malfoys or Lestranges or Blacks, the absence of information does make it impossible to say that canonically the Prince family were a pureblood family and not just a magical family who may have had a more blended heritage (a more mixed-lineage could even go towards explaining how Eileen came to meet and marry Tobias). Unlike Tom Riddle, Snape’s familial background may not have been vague enough for him to be able to claim ties to any ancient or illustrious pureblood family (as we saw Umbridge do when claiming an unverified connection to the Selwyn family) in order to overshadow his Muggle heritage. Thus, where Riddle was able to enter Slytherin as a half-blood orphan and declare himself Salazar Slytherin’s chosen heir courtesy of his connection to the Gaunt family, at most we see that Snape privately claimed his connection to his mother’s family in the guise of “The Half-blood Prince.”
Arguably, that provides us with an important contrast to Tom Riddle and some insight into adolescent Snape. Where Tom Riddle uses his connection to the Gaunt family as a means of fully rejecting his father’s Muggle heritage and validating his Muggleborn prejudices by declaring himself Salazar Slytherin’s heir, there are different implications to a young Snape writing: “I am the Half-Blood Prince” in his mother’s old Potions textbook. Rather than using his mother’s magical lineage as a means to entirely divest himself of his father’s Muggle heritage, it would seem that at the point when Snape scrawled that statement into his textbook he was far more set on acknowledging both his magical and Muggle status within the wizarding world in a way that I would argue doubled as bitterly sardonic and challenging. Indeed, the very statement: “I am the Half-Blood Prince” connotes defiance on his part; a suggestion that at one point in his life Snape seemed very set on proving his worth on his own terms as a half-blood from an impoverished background who was nonetheless still “half a Prince,” and that he would defy anyone who might have told him that he did not belong. This does seem to conflict with the idea that all of Snape’s adolescent years at Hogwarts were marked by him having the same deeply ingrained prejudices or the exact ideological beliefs that purebloods like Lucius Malfoy might have.
If we look at the classifications of Muggle-born, half-blood, and pureblood as allegories for certain racial and ethnic statuses (and that purebloods represented the group with the greatest hierarchal advantage and most privilege) then the extent to which various wizards or witches that came from non-pureblood families could nonetheless still claim some vague status as purebloods could be looked at as allegorical to the concept of “passing privilege.” Ergo, Tom Riddle was able to convincingly “pass” as a member of the pureblood elite by claiming his connections to Salazar Slytherin through the Gaunt family. Furthermore, he completely abandons his more obvious Muggle-given name of Tom Riddle and chooses a name (i.e. Voldemort) that allowed him to further obscure his lineage. I would argue that, in contrast to Voldemort, Snape did not have passing privilege coming into Hogwarts. The very nature of the way he claims his connection to his mother’s magical lineage seems to suggest that an adolescent Snape was aware that his half-blood status was not something he could conceal or entirely rid himself of in the way Tom Riddle was able to do (and again, the very nature of the statement “I am the Half-Blood Prince” does seem to suggest he may not have wanted to pass himself off as more of a pureblood).
Which brings me to the issues of indoctrination and internalized prejudice. Significantly, I believe that a young Snape may have been aware of anti-Muggleborn prejudice even before he arrived at Hogwarts. The pause after Lily asked Snape if her being Muggle-born would make any difference at Hogwarts was poignant and suggested an existing knowledge on Snape’s part. Which begs the question of how he became aware of the existence of such prejudices? The logical answer is that he learned about them the same way he learned about the other aspects of the magical world, from his mother. It is even possible that in some of the arguments between Tobias and Eileen he may have witnessed both anti-magic and anti-Muggle prejudices from them. When asked by Lily if Tobias liked magic a young Snape deflected by observing Tobias “didn’t like anything much,” so there is a basis to argue that magic might have been a point of contention for Tobias. Likewise, one could make the case that Eileen also lashed out and a young Snape might have overheard her criticizing Tobias on the basis of him being a Muggle. Notably, Snape has to catch himself when he almost dismisses Petunia as “just a Muggle” when Lily is upset after arguing with Petunia (who demonstrated her own seeming magical prejudices by calling Lily a freak) shortly before boarding the Hogwarts Express.
Overall, I would argue that if an adolescent Snape came to Hogwarts with any overt prejudices they were more likely anti-Muggle prejudices than they were anti-Muggleborn prejudices. Indeed, while a young Snape does hesitate before reassuring Lily that her Muggleborn heritage would make no difference, he does seem rather (naively) convinced that her magical talent would be enough for her to avoid experiencing any anti-Muggleborn prejudice while at Hogwarts. Alternatively, he frequently disparaged Petunia --who in turn targeted him for his class status-- for being a Muggle. I would theorize that a young Snape who might have been disillusioned by a father who is strongly implied to have been potentially abusive to his mother (and quite possibly him) and antagonistic towards magic and who would have potentially overheard any anti-Muggle sentiments spoken by his mother would have arrived at Hogwarts with an existing prejudice against Muggles if not yet Muggleborns.
From there any progression of anti-Muggle to anti-Muggleborn would have been the result a few complicated factors ranging from: his frequency of exposure to a culture of prejudice within Slytherin house by a certain number of vocal and influential peers, the issue of the existing stigma surrounding Slytherin house and how the culture of Hogwarts seems to reward disenfranchisement of Slytherin by the other houses and teachers, Snape’s own growing sense of alienation and disenfranchisement as his bullying by the Marauders escalated and Dumbledore and other figures of authority failed to adequately respond which would have made him more vulnerable to grooming and radicalization, Snape’s own lack of privilege (i.e. his lack of passing privilege, his half-blood status, and his class status) in Slytherin house making it more necessary for Snape to conform with to avoid drawing a target onto himself by members of his house (particularly when he would already feel a lack of security outside of his house due to the Marauders and seeming institutional biases against Slytherin house at Hogwarts), and any internalized prejudices Snape carried as a result of any resentment he may have felt towards his Muggle father, Tobias.
I’ve written about this before but I believe the road to Snape becoming a Death Eater was a complex one. In contrast to the Malfoys, the Lestranges, or the Black family Snape was not born into wealth and privilege. He had no claims to “The Sacred Twenty-Eight,” and no real social standing. In terms of hierarchy, and to borrow from Slughorn, Snape “did not have much to recommend him.” These aspects of Snape are imperative to understanding what might have led to him becoming a Death Eater and not just in the context of fictional analysis, either. In a very real-world sense, Snape provides us some insight into the ways that adolescents can become radicalized or groomed into extremists groups, gangs, and cults. It is a gross oversight to lump Snape into the same category as Lucius Malfoy because Snape’s reasons for becoming a Death Eater and the outlook of any prejudices he held would have been very different due in large part to his blood status, class status, and social standing.
Lucius Malfoy supported Voldemort and became a Death Eater because he regarded Muggle-borns as a threat to the privilege he already held in wizarding society; he became a Death Eater because he was motivated to hold onto his privilege, which is why both he and Narcissa Malfoy were willing to set aside their blood purity ideologies and turn away from Voldemort when it became clear that Voldemort was an even greater immediate threat to them than Muggle-borns. In contrast, Snape held no significant privilege in wizarding society; he was not a pureblood, he seemingly could not pass as belonging to one of the “Sacred Twenty-Eight,” and he came from poverty and of a low-class standing. Rationally speaking, Snape did not become a Death Eater because he had reason to believe Muggle-borns were threatening his privilege in the wizarding world because Snape did not enter into the wizarding world with significant advantages or privileges (indeed, as a half-blood his position in a world dominated by Voldemort’s ideology would be far more precarious which is why I suspect that the alternate future we saw in Cursed Child where Voldemort won saw a post-war Snape relegated back to a mostly invisible role as potion’s professor at Hogwarts again while someone like Umbridge with more passing privilege was upgraded to the role of Headmistress). I would argue that prejudice against Muggle-borns was not even a driving factor in why he became a Death Eater (although he might have had what he felt were valid reasons to believe that inter-marriages between Muggles and magical people didn’t need to continue and that Muggles like Tobias were only a danger to them and their world) so much as the promise of power, protection, and belonging.
Which brings me back to the driving force behind a lot of the radicalization of adolescents we encounter in a very real sense. A common factor, the one which renders them most vulnerable, is their feelings of disenfranchisement and their disillusionment with a society that not only seems to not work for them but is unfairly designed to work against them. In a fictional context, Snape manages to encapsulate the idea of the angry young person whose outlook and future prospects seem hopeless (regardless of any innate talents, ambition, or hard work on their part) and who feels unfairly attacked by institutions and systems beyond their control. More than any prejudice as a motivating factor, I would argue that a young Snape would have been very vulnerable to grooming from peers like Lucius Malfoy who could build off any existing anti-Muggle prejudices he might have carried while also promising him a chance for greater social standing and influencing power.
It is important to keep in mind that even in his own house he was dismissed by Slughorn, who famously cultivated a social networking system of carefully selected students he felt had the most potential. Thus, one can imagine an ambitious young Snape who once looked to Hogwarts as an escape from his circumstances on Spinner’s End and who seemed to defiantly insist upon making a name for himself on his own terms (i.e. “I am the Half-Blood Prince”) having all his childhood ambitions gradually disappointed; over the course of the seven years he would spend as a student at Hogwarts he would be confronted by the cruel reality that life in the magical world was no less fair to him than life in the Muggle world had been. Enter the likes of Lucius Malfoy (who also is symbolically the first person to extend Snape a hand of welcome at Hogwarts after running up against James and Sirius on the train) and other impressive peers from pureblood families and one can begin to see what some of the allure of the Death Eaters might have been (that’s not even getting into the fact that the Marauders had so staunchly aligned themselves on the opposite side so it would also have felt like a natural extension of the lines that had been drawn at Hogwarts in choosing the side in opposition of his school-hood enemies).
The extent to which Snape carried any significant anti-Muggleborn prejudices (that is not to say that he didn’t carry Muggle-born prejudices to some degree but that those prejudices were not so significant in his consciousness that we could argue they were the main motivating factor in his decision to become a Death Eater) is, I believe, debatable. Certainly, he called Lily a Mudblood in a moment where he had been rendered powerless and emasculated and Lily later claimed that Snape “called everyone” like her Mudbloods (which I suspect was supposition and hyperbole on her part; otherwise, it paints Lily’s character in a less sympathetic light wherein we discover she was willing to overlook Snape’s use of slurs up to the point she was no longer the exception when it came to him using them) but even that instance could stand as an example of assimilation. Whether Snape was remaining silent while his peers used derogatory slurs around him or he chose to use them in his company, the instance where Snape was put under pressure and the language asserted itself is a testament to the way existing in an environment of prejudice and allowing it to go unchallenged can lead to us internalizing those prejudices. Indeed, when Snape later refuses to allow Phineas Nigellus to use the slur in his company can be looked at as an example of Snape having learned from the mistakes of his youth and taken the initiative to proactively challenge prejudice whenever possible as an adult.
Ultimately, I believe Snape did internalize ideas of anti-Muggle prejudice but I also would argue that that was not the primary reason or driving force for his becoming a Death Eater. I believe there were a number of factors that led to that choice and it was primarily the allure of power and security that proved the most appealing to him. There is also a strong case of naivete to be argued on Snape’s part, in that he --like Draco-- seemed not to fully recognize what he had signed up for until the reality of it hit home. That Voldemort would target someone he knew, a formerly treasured childhood friend, appeared to bring home to Snape the reality of what he had become a part of and who he had pledged his allegiance to. I would also argue that early on, Voldemort appeared to have been willing to recruit gifted Muggle-borns into his ranks, so it is also quite possible that during the first war Voldemort’s rhetoric might have been slanted more firmly against the idea of Muggle incursions in their world or the way the Secrecy Act disenfranchised their people rather than a blatant call-to-arms against members of their community that, while Muggle-born, were still magical and ran the risk of alienating people away from public support.
That is often the case with extremist organizations; they test the waters and start with more palatable or deceptive “populist” messages with a broader mass appeal before they introduce their more extreme views by degrees. We have seen some of this with the Trump administration, who began under more innocuous slogans like “Make America Great Again” and have only become more emboldened since in their dog-whistles to white supremacy and ideas of nationalism (e.g. Trump has even openly come out and declared himself a nationalist in past interviews following the Charlottesville attack on protestors and his refusal to condemn those actions). Significantly, in the first war, we know that Voldemort had enough popular support his followers were able to outnumber Dumbledore and his Order by twenty-to-one. I would argue that was achievable only if Voldemort first entered the scene under a more flexible message that allowed him to draw in members of the wizarding world with more casual prejudices towards Muggle and build up his inner circle of the more extreme Death Eaters like Bellatrix and Lucius who held the strongest anti-Muggleborn prejudices.
Finally, I believe that the likelihood of internalized prejudice cannot be underscored. Someone who may have grown up with an abusive Muggle father, like Snape, could have internalized prejudice about his half-blood status as something with the potential to mark him as inferior. His resentment of his father becoming a resentment of Muggles, in general, is the very sort of toxic cocktail that could lead a young Snape to align himself with a Voldemort who his peers assure him can understand him and his hatred of his Muggle father. In that scenario, Voldemort is merely someone sympathetic to his situation; someone who validates his belief that Muggles are a danger to the magical community; that they are to blame for keeping their kind oppressed and forced to remain in the shadows; they are a poison to their society, etc. Additionally, being at Hogwarts and feeling as if the majority of the school were rooting for him --and his house by extension-- to fail would have only strengthened a culture of peer pressure, allowing house-mates from the most influential families to set the tone within the house, decide house politics, and enforce a group-think where the consequences of going against the popular narrative are complete ostracization within one’s house and no protection from the ostracization Slytherin students can expect to face in general. Thus we have Snape, a half-blood from poverty and a preexisting internalized prejudice against his potentially abusive Muggle father coming to Hogwarts and being sorted into a house where his options are to choose between his house being his only respite from the institutional biases of the school at large or a place where he’s further alienated from everyone else except the people out to get him can also get him where he sleeps. Indeed, the very fact that up to SWM, Harry observes that Snape was “clearly unpopular” might suggest that Snape had been reluctant up to that point to fully assimilate into the ideologies of his house and his friendship with Lily led to some friction (it might go towards explaining how Sirius and James could publically humiliate him to onlookers and not a single member of his house come to his defense).
All this to say that I suspect that Snape’s path towards becoming a Death Eater happened by degrees. I would argue that he might have arrived at Hogwarts with some internalized prejudice against Muggles but an ambition to prove himself on his own terms (i.e. as “the Half-Blood Prince”) and a belief that raw talent and hard work would be enough for him to distinguish himself. When those ambitions proved faulty and when faced with seemingly insurmountable institutional biases within Hogwarts and slim prospects outside of Hogwarts that was when he became disillusioned and more susceptible to the ideological grooming within his house. That is why these contradictions in Snape may not be contradictions at all but rather more insight into the way a small boy who managed to seem impressive talking about his future would become a Death Eater. He may have started off with a certain degree of faith in the idea that gifted people like him and Lily could take the world by storm; that he could succeed as the Half-Blood Prince and she as a Muggle-born and no one would question their right to be there or their place in the world. Sadly, by the time he left Hogwarts, both he and Lily had had that innocence stripped from them and the choices he made would take him far from whatever ideas he once had as a boy for their future.
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