Why The Phrase ‘Half-Blood’ Needs Serious Interrogation
By Guest Contributor Jennifer from 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.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page