Sirius Black's family seems to be very strong on the idea of "bloody purity".
Is there any reason given to explain why he had such different views to his relatives?
Sirius Black's family seems to be very strong on the idea of "bloody purity".
Is there any reason given to explain why he had such different views to his relatives?
Why does any child end up with different views than their parents? You might very well ask why Ronald Reagan Jr. is a staunch liberal while his adopted brother Michael is a conservative. These things are complicated, with no easy answer.
What we do know is that Sirius was rebellious from a young age. Even at the age of 11 on the train to Hogwarts, he smiles when James disses Slytherin to his face, and aims to "break tradition." I daresay that if he had been born to a family of Muggle lovers, he might have ended up a bigot.
He also mentions that Andromeda was his favorite cousin, who ended up marrying a Muggle-born. She's much older than Sirius, and might have influenced his views growing up.
And maybe some of it was Lupin's friendship as well - knowing someone who had this reason to feel isolated/different, yet befriending him, not accepting his evasions (why do you have to leave every full moon? etc), and eventually becoming close friends.
Plus he was in Gryffindor, surrounded by other Gryffindors (such as harry's dad), who tended to be further from a more Slytherin-esque view of things....
I don't know that I see him as potentially holding those views. It just doesn't seem like it would be part of his personality somehow.
That said, maybe his outlook is more influenced by a certain kind of difficult-to-unlearn snobbishness, anyway? He is pretty awful to Kreacher, as Dumbledore and Hermione note; and perhaps there is an element of classism in his attitude towards Snape? I kind of got the feeling he and James saw Snape as the 'annoying, awkward poor kid/misfit' - a sort of typical but unspoken nastiness. ('It's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean...)
He did come from an 'old money' kind of family, no? And this is Britain, remember; where even the accents tell you about status and class.