Why The Phrase ‘Half-Blood’ Needs Serious Interrogation

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.”

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