Recently I've begun reading the Harry Potter books for the first time. That's right, at twenty one years old I've never read J.K. Rowling's famous series, but now I'm jumping on the bandwagon ten years late. I'm only about halfway through the first one, but I've really been enjoying them so far (and slowly but surely all the references I've been hearing people make for years are starting to make so much more sense). There's a scene relatively near the beginning, during Harry's first official day of school at Hogwarts, when he walks into Professor Snape's Potions class. Do you remember that scene? It's probably been a while since you read it, for those of you who read the books when they first came out, but Snape ask Harry a bunch of obscure questions about potion ingredients, which Harry of course doesn't know the answers to, and Snape uses his ignorance to embarrass him in front of the other students. This is something I’ve been noticing is a problem in various aspects of the social justice movement lately. I mean, no one is quizzing students on potion ingredients and humiliating them for not knowing the answers, but I think we can all agree that what Snape did was really unfair. Harry just learned that wizards exist days ago. He hasn’t had time to learn any of this stuff. Of course he doesn’t know about crazy potion ingredients, he’s barely learned what magic even is.
Likewise, in the real world we can’t expect people to be experts on anything right out of the starting gate. No one is born with an innate knowledge of American race politics, or socially constructed gender roles, or the effects of class war on the lowest income citizens of a society, or anything else. We all had to learn. And yes, ideally people should be interested and want to learn, and shouldn’t put the burden solely on others to educate them. If you want to learn about racism you need to do your own research. But for anyone who is well informed about social injustice and wants to educate others, you need to give people room to be ignorant if you want them to ever be educated. Everyone, especially people who have never personally experienced the negative effects of the kind of injustice they want to learn about, need the room to ask stupid questions, or the same questions everyone has been asking forever, they need room to think about things in a reductionistic way and be uninformed before they’re ever going to think about things insightfully and be informed. It’s like learning a new language; you have to get past the awkward, fumbling, I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing phase before you can do anything productive. As frustrating as it can be when people who should know better are uneducated about how privilege works, attacking them for it is one way to ensure that they will never pursue that education. So don’t be a Snape, give people the room they need to figure out their own prejudices and the systems they live in. That’s the only way more people will understand.
