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narcasseUnravelling the details over time, forgetfulness and flashes of insight I can finally come up with a good comparison when it comes to charting the progress of fictional racists. Seth Nightlord of Trinity Blood and Severus Snape of Harry Potter and the Noun of Adjective both being the sort of subtly racist characters who usually get entirely overshadowed by the obvious ones.
Severus Snape after all isn’t so overtly bothered by the existence of muggles as his fellow Death Eaters but he certainly doesn’t voice anything like objection to the Death Eaters' agenda. He certainly views muggles as lesser lifeforms and throws out racial slurs in a way that suggests he doesn’t find anything wrong in using them. The racist viewpoint is there along with the usual case history of feeling that he’s in an inferior position, so that he grasps whatever he can to claim some superiority for whatever reason. Snape’s the sort of character who without the Death Eaters might have carried on quite happily as a passive racist. He wouldn’t go out of his way to cause muggles much harm but he certainly wouldn’t treat them with the sort of respect that he’d accord another wizard. He might not like other wizards but there’s no great conviction of his inherent superiority there where as with muggles, by the sheer accident of birth, even if they’re muggle-born he can laud his half-blood status over them.
It takes the death of the woman he loves, a muggle-born who also happened to be just about his only friend, to make him realise that there’s not that much of a divide between passive and active racism, and that eventually it gets people killed. Even then it’s possible to argue that Snape doesn’t figure out that if you don’t treat people like people and insist on adding in clauses that say some types of people are better than others from your point of assumed superiority that it leads to terrible things till much later. Lilly’s death is a shock to him certainly but even with all the realisation in the world it would take him some time to unlearn instinctive reflexes. The gut reaction to throw out racial slurs, to presume that muggles and muggle-borns were automatically inferior in certain ways, the willingness to automatically filter out the concerns of those non-pureblood or halfblood wizards would all take time and conscious effort to reprogram.
Of course in the end, by the time of the books, it does appear that Snape has figured things out. He still has plenty of issues and to his misfortune never has the time or inclination to sit down and apply himself to those too but if his response to Draco flinging the same racial slur that he used many years ago is anything to go by there’s a touch of understanding there at last: He’s figured out that the end result of creating and reinforcing a deliberate and yet completely arbitrary imbalance in the world is disaster. And I like to think that Snape is intellectual enough that he can see that even without the slightest touch of egalitarian spirit such an imbalance simply makes for poor utility in both wizarding and muggle worlds.
Seth Nightlord like Snape suffers from an inferiority complex but hers is a little less straightforward. As a genetically engineered human being designed to manage the regular human colonists on Mars she ought to simply be prey to the loneliness of a command position but unfortunately that isolation due to superior rank and expectation also combines with the persistently damaging idea that due to her birth she isn't truly human. Seth’s situation is thus complicated by both inferiority complex and coping mechanism i.e. superiority complex, though broken down into those composite parts Seth’s situation is just as straightforward as Snape’s.
Seth fits the profile for a ‘concerned’ racist completely because her sense of isolation and inferiority fuels her desire to find something she can feel superior about and in her case that combines with her designation as a director of human action. She latches on to the one aspect where she can feel superior, an aspect that neither she nor the terran she looks down on have any control over. Thus while she acknowledges that the situation isn’t their fault she goes a step further and decides that from her superior position she ought to manage matters for them. While Snape is happy to let the muggles alone and simply feel superior to them in isolation and without direct action Seth takes that next step into damnation by trying to reinvent her complex as a moral burden to ‘help’ the terran all without actually looking to what the terran need or want.
Seth’s actions are comparable to the sort of fiasco that tends to happen every time there’s a disaster or a cause that needs to be fought by marginalised groups. She’s the antiracist activist who tells POC that what they’re experiencing isn’t racism, the chap who mansplains on a feminist blog, the fag hag who stereotypes and decides that some people just aren’t ‘gay enough’. She’s the derailing that keeps arguing that classism is the issue or gender or sexual orientation or anything but race right in the middle of race discussions, all the while telling POC that the issue isn’t a legacy of racist systems: it’s them, if only they changed, if only they followed her instructions, if only they stopped wanting equality, if only they stopped being so damn coloured then nothing would be wrong.
Unlike Snape, Seth doesn’t get a wakeup call in the end, in fact she does everything in her power to ignore the problem which is at least in keeping with racist attitudes but therein lies the contrast. Snape is on a path to development and while his issues certainly aren’t entirely resolved by the time of his death he’s made it some fair way there. Seth on the other hand remains in self-denial, which is at the end of the day rather appropriate for the character since her Empire’s attitudes to the rest of Europe hold up as a fantasy of the most sympathetic possible reasons for Japan’s attitudes to the rest of the world at times.
Severus Snape after all isn’t so overtly bothered by the existence of muggles as his fellow Death Eaters but he certainly doesn’t voice anything like objection to the Death Eaters' agenda. He certainly views muggles as lesser lifeforms and throws out racial slurs in a way that suggests he doesn’t find anything wrong in using them. The racist viewpoint is there along with the usual case history of feeling that he’s in an inferior position, so that he grasps whatever he can to claim some superiority for whatever reason. Snape’s the sort of character who without the Death Eaters might have carried on quite happily as a passive racist. He wouldn’t go out of his way to cause muggles much harm but he certainly wouldn’t treat them with the sort of respect that he’d accord another wizard. He might not like other wizards but there’s no great conviction of his inherent superiority there where as with muggles, by the sheer accident of birth, even if they’re muggle-born he can laud his half-blood status over them.
It takes the death of the woman he loves, a muggle-born who also happened to be just about his only friend, to make him realise that there’s not that much of a divide between passive and active racism, and that eventually it gets people killed. Even then it’s possible to argue that Snape doesn’t figure out that if you don’t treat people like people and insist on adding in clauses that say some types of people are better than others from your point of assumed superiority that it leads to terrible things till much later. Lilly’s death is a shock to him certainly but even with all the realisation in the world it would take him some time to unlearn instinctive reflexes. The gut reaction to throw out racial slurs, to presume that muggles and muggle-borns were automatically inferior in certain ways, the willingness to automatically filter out the concerns of those non-pureblood or halfblood wizards would all take time and conscious effort to reprogram.
Of course in the end, by the time of the books, it does appear that Snape has figured things out. He still has plenty of issues and to his misfortune never has the time or inclination to sit down and apply himself to those too but if his response to Draco flinging the same racial slur that he used many years ago is anything to go by there’s a touch of understanding there at last: He’s figured out that the end result of creating and reinforcing a deliberate and yet completely arbitrary imbalance in the world is disaster. And I like to think that Snape is intellectual enough that he can see that even without the slightest touch of egalitarian spirit such an imbalance simply makes for poor utility in both wizarding and muggle worlds.
Seth Nightlord like Snape suffers from an inferiority complex but hers is a little less straightforward. As a genetically engineered human being designed to manage the regular human colonists on Mars she ought to simply be prey to the loneliness of a command position but unfortunately that isolation due to superior rank and expectation also combines with the persistently damaging idea that due to her birth she isn't truly human. Seth’s situation is thus complicated by both inferiority complex and coping mechanism i.e. superiority complex, though broken down into those composite parts Seth’s situation is just as straightforward as Snape’s.
Seth fits the profile for a ‘concerned’ racist completely because her sense of isolation and inferiority fuels her desire to find something she can feel superior about and in her case that combines with her designation as a director of human action. She latches on to the one aspect where she can feel superior, an aspect that neither she nor the terran she looks down on have any control over. Thus while she acknowledges that the situation isn’t their fault she goes a step further and decides that from her superior position she ought to manage matters for them. While Snape is happy to let the muggles alone and simply feel superior to them in isolation and without direct action Seth takes that next step into damnation by trying to reinvent her complex as a moral burden to ‘help’ the terran all without actually looking to what the terran need or want.
Seth’s actions are comparable to the sort of fiasco that tends to happen every time there’s a disaster or a cause that needs to be fought by marginalised groups. She’s the antiracist activist who tells POC that what they’re experiencing isn’t racism, the chap who mansplains on a feminist blog, the fag hag who stereotypes and decides that some people just aren’t ‘gay enough’. She’s the derailing that keeps arguing that classism is the issue or gender or sexual orientation or anything but race right in the middle of race discussions, all the while telling POC that the issue isn’t a legacy of racist systems: it’s them, if only they changed, if only they followed her instructions, if only they stopped wanting equality, if only they stopped being so damn coloured then nothing would be wrong.
Unlike Snape, Seth doesn’t get a wakeup call in the end, in fact she does everything in her power to ignore the problem which is at least in keeping with racist attitudes but therein lies the contrast. Snape is on a path to development and while his issues certainly aren’t entirely resolved by the time of his death he’s made it some fair way there. Seth on the other hand remains in self-denial, which is at the end of the day rather appropriate for the character since her Empire’s attitudes to the rest of Europe hold up as a fantasy of the most sympathetic possible reasons for Japan’s attitudes to the rest of the world at times.
