written by Love Isn’t Enough contributor Jennifer; originally published at Mixed Race America
This morning I woke up and did my daily routine: I went for a walk (1-2 miles — good for keeping me healthy esp. with
the chemo treatments, and just as an f.y.i. aside, the treatments are taking their toll on me, in terms of my level of fatigue–which is high (sigh) and which is one reason I haven’t been blogging as regularly as I like), I drank some water, and I open up my laptop to read The New York Times. And the first thing that caught my eye this morning was this blurb from the article, “At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off the Page“:
“Organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.” [The emphasis in bold is my doing]
The article describes a trend for summer camps based on literary themes, most notably those centered around fantasy children/young adult works of fiction, like the Harry Potter novels or the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
Apparently the premise of the Jackson series (and this I’ve gleaned from the article and from the trailers to the movie of the same name that came out last summer) is that Percy is a young kid who finds out that his Mom slept with a god and so Percy is a demi-god in the making–a “half-blood” if you will. So this Brooklyn summer camp divides up these kids into different “half-blood” groups–like some are the half-human/half-divine offspring of Apollo or of Ares.
[Note: they probably didn't choose some of the more "problematic" gods, like what would the group look like and what would they DO if they were the offspring of Bacchus or Hades? And apparently all the kids in this particular camp are boys, but it still doesn't make sense why they don't seem to have an Artemis group or a Hera group, although Aphrodite may also be problematic in a different way...]
So I get it. The “half-blood” designation is supposed to refer to the fact that these kids are pretending (like their literary counterpart) to be half human and half god.
But is it just me or does anyone else see a lot of problems with the use of the phrase “half-blood”?
First of all, these kids are pretending that their Mom shacked up with a god–and that it’s perfectly normative for these male gods to have fathered multiple children with various women who have apparently all cuckolded their partners or the “human” fathers of these children. Now, I know: I’m being nit-picky here. And I don’t think that any of these kids are really confused or that it’s sending a bad message about their particular mothers. But I do think that the idea that you can be a male god and have sex with any number of women, human or divine, is part of what gives license to male privilege and the idea that it’s OK for men to have multiple sex partners and to father multiple children without also PARENTING them. Because I mean look at poor Percy–he grows up not knowing who his real Dad is until he’s 12. So where was his old man? Off doing the divine thing? And he gets cut slack because he’s a god? Who was changing Percy’s diaper and teaching him to walk and taking him to school and providing for his basic material and emotional needs? The single mom.
Seems like there’s a ripe human contemporary counterpart in the making if we think about male celebrities. I mean, don’t we hear stories all the time, esp. in the world of music, about rock stars or even someone like Ravi Shankar, who leave behind bits of their seed in the form of actual children who grow up and, in the case of Norah Jones, becomes a major recording artist following in the footsteps of the father who fathered but didn’t parent her.
Anyway, the real reason I find the phrase “half-blood” problematic is that it’s an offensive term that has typically been used as a racial slur against mixed-race people and very specifically against mixed American Indian people.
For example, if you google “half blood definition” you will find the following from both Answer.com and The Free Dictionary [which gets their source from the American Heritage Dictionary]:
half blood also half-blood
n.1.
a. The relationship existing between persons having only one parent in common.
b. A person existing in such a relationship.2. Offensive A person of mixed racial descent, especially a person of Native American and white parentage.
[emphasis in bold is mine]3. A half-blooded domestic animal.
And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “half-blood” has at its core the idea that there is both a quantifiable (”half”) notion of blood AND a qualifiable (as in hierarchical) idea embedded in the phrase “half-blood”:
“half-blooded a., born of different races; spec. of superior blood or race by one parent only.”
[again, emphasis in bold is mine]
It just makes me cringe to think that these kids are going to these “half-blood” camps and will be referring to themselves as “half-bloods” without understanding the long and painful racial/racist history behind that term AND without understanding how problematic it is to split one’s “blood” and the not-so-implicit connotations of blood (and really, wherever you see the word “blood” you should insert the word “race”) as purity–of being able to determine which bloodline is better than the other.
Better to be a divine than to be human — sure, that’s easy to see. Who wouldn’t want to be able to fly or have supernatural powers. But we don’t live in a fantasy world–and I just think it’s too easy to to take that thinking to the next level–how much better to be white (the normative, the majority, the race that is associated with beauty and power and prowess) than to be “other”–one of those hyphenated, brown-skinned, minority Americans.
And finally, (and forgive me because what follows next is my attempt to be ironic through a self-conscious use of racial slurs — which I KNOW are offensive and hurtful, but I am trying to slam home a point with a blunt tool) but I just can’t see any camp or book publisher being OK with titles like: Harry Potter and the Chink Princess or Percy Jackson and His Nigger Friends or Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Lost Kikes.
But on second thought, maybe “half-blood” isn’t as offensive a term as these other racial slurs…maybe it’d be more like the equivalent of Harry Potter and the Oriental Princess or Percy Jackson and His Negro Friends, in which case I wouldn’t put it past any mainstream publishing house to go with these titles, esp. “Oriental.”
Anyway, if your child comes home proclaiming to be a “half-blood,” it may just be time to sit him/her down and have a talk about language. I mean, I know language changes, and there’s a movement to reclaim phrases. But last time I checked, large groups of Indian American activists were NOT agitating to use the phrase “half-blood” as a term of empowerment in the way that gay and lesbian activists have tried to take back the term “queer.”
I have not read the Harry Potter books, but I didn’t like the title of this one for exactly these reasons. Do we chalk this up to the fact that Rowling is a Brit? Not an excuse, but maybe a reason?
I completely take your point here, and do not defend these books and their use of the word – language is fraught. As a historian particularly interested in gender, the books do a better job than most. (I’m an ancient and medieval historian, btw.)
Just a couple of notes though, from someone who has read all these books. There are many girls in the Percy Jackson books, some with male divine fathers and others with female divine mothers. The Hermes house is led by a girl and that house is just as wicked as one would want from the god of war, as is the house of Athena – wisdom is often cruel. There is a Bacchus house and one of Aphrodite – and the author has caught quite a bit of flak from that, but I think both were done as well as one could for a YA audience.
I don’t think the author thought about the racial connotations of “half-blood” – hence your rightful unease and unhappiness. He does, however, deal quite a bit with the single parent and the child who grows up with only one parent and wondering where the other parent is. I think many of us always wanted to be from “special” parents – even if both our parents were around!
He does also deal with ADD and ADHD and how it is perceived as a negative and can be used as a positive (author’s own son is ADD).
So, while I agree with your ideas here, I think there is a lot of good to these particular books. His history is spot on (which means it isn’t always as “nice” as we’d like it to be), his characters struggle with knowing themselves and how they fit into a world where people look at them differently, and they find confidence in their own abilities – ones that come from both parents. The protagonist is male and decent – which isn’t always easy to find.
Tami, I hear you on the phrase “half-blood.” But a lot of your other issues with the Percy Jackson books are just wrong. Dionysus (ie Bacchus) runs the camp. Hades features prominently. All of the major gods are represented. One of the main characters is Athena’s daughter, and she kicks ass. And Athena has TONS of children–including (in the world of this book) George Washington!
The phrase is game for criticism. But, seriously, read at least the first book (it’s short and quite delightful) before you criticize it for anything other than this particular unfortunate phrase.
I haven’t read the books, so I defer to the commenters above who have. But on the issue of the term “half-blood” in general – it reminds me of my (mild) issue with the term “bi-racial.” Now, I understand that people have the right to identify however they like, but to me, the term bi-racial has the connotations of reifying the idea that race is biological, that when two people of difference “races” come together and make a baby, the resulting child has both races and is then “bi-racial.” This has always bothered me. In the same way as being a “half-blood”, it is not possible to quantify one’s “race,” if we understand race to be socially constructed and based on phenotype. Now perhaps we have socially constructed a new racial category called “bi-racial,” but I wish it was called something else.
I would say if you haven’t read the books (Harry Potter or Percy Jackson) then it is hard to be 100% behind your argument. Especially Harry Potter, where Rowling’s entire series is based on developing the theme of equality, and the bad guys are the ones who defend a form of segregation in the magical world. Rowling has done a fantastic job of taking a very real problem (racism/elitism) and transferring it to a completely fictional world where the characters must grapple with those issues. When I read the series with my oldest child, we wound up having fantastic discussions about Jim Crow laws in our country as well as Nazi Germany. As for Percy Jackson, I agree with you about the gods getting to sleep with mortal woman and then not being around to father the offspring, but as for the term “half bloods” they characters use it to refer to themselves, and only as a characteristic that they share with one another.
@LaToya do you have a preferred term?
I’ve been thinking this over since I wrote originally on the Open thread http://loveisntenough.com/2010/08/12/open-thread-91/#comments, and I’m thinking hey – I liked being half-blood from both sides. I actually have come to appreciate more and more the feeling the kids get in both the Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter books of needing to fit into two completely different worlds that consider each other mutually insane. It sounds like the world we lived in. The fact that the word strikes close to an old nerve may actually be just fine – I want my son to know what to do when people say sh*t to him, and it *will* happen again someday, so it’s good to have a chance to really reclaim this feeling. Haven’t gotten that far in the HP series, so we’ll probably get to talking about that next month at our house, since he’s deep in the Phoenix now. I’m beginning to feel about the word like I did about queer when it first started getting reclaimed. Of course, it could all change around tomorrow, as opinions do.
@Krysta: You know, I don’t, mostly because I’m trying to be aware of people who are self-identifying. In my mind, however, how are you classified as you walk down the street? It unfortunately comes down to choose one box, because that is most likely how one is perceived, and how one is treated. And that is the basis for race, and racial stratification.
I would submit that JK Rowling’s series is itself an interrogation of the concept of “half-bloods.” While racism as our world knows it is not raised in the books, the wizarding obsession with pure bloods, muggles, and mudbloods is a thinly veiled code for real world racism. That’s not to say that Rowling is perfect in her analysis, but she provides an engaging springboard from which to look at these issues both within her books and within society, for youth and adults alike. I have used her series to discuss everything from racism to homophobia, colonialism to classism and more, with classes of all ages.
Also, the OP really does need to read the Percy Jackson books. Rick Riordan very much addresses the realities of single parents and absent parents. It does get into the complexities of what happens when the immortals get involved with mortals – and does so in surprisingly real-world ways. His books also include a racially diverse list of characters. His new series features an interracial family that directly discusses the challenges of how their family is perceived by others. His books use fantasy to explore many issues that real kids face in their lives, from racism, to blended families, to learning disabilities.