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Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Maybe I misunderstand you, but every single Dutch person I know refers to mixed race as 'halfbloed', which means half-blood, which, now that I think of it, sounds rather racist.

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As a dutch person, why do you think that sounds racist? It's like bloodlines. One half from one bloodline, one half from another bloodline. It's mostly used to refer to offspring from two differently colored people (not necessarily races), but I don't see the term "halfbloed" as particularly racist?

You could read "half-blood" as only one half of the blood being of the "good" type. That is, you're only "half" as good as a person which has only the "good" type of blood.

In English, at best it sounds woefully inaccurate as that isn't really how blood works, but bloodlines are generally the sort of thing either discussed by people who trace royals and believe in the divine rights of kings and stuff like that, or people or are worried about theirs being diluted due to a woeful misunderstanding of how biology works that would be amusing if they didn't tend to be such utter bastards, or those who breed weirdly malformed dogs and then take them to shows, rather than those who are particularly interested in the parentage of someone.

You're absolutely right, it probably does originate from the colonial/medieval days but nowadays it's just an expression, at least in Western Europe.

The biological correctness of it didn't even cross my mind; blue blood, for example, is the term we use when we talk about royal ancestry. It's not like we think that the blood of the royal family is actually blue, however the term does originate from a time where royals were lighter skinned than the working class of peasants, and thus their veins appeared to be more blue than others.

One thing is that there is still strong usage of terms like blood-line, half-blood and blue-blood in English within fantasy novels and period dramas, however the reason they are popular in those settings is precisely because they feel so archaic.

The whole concept of "bloodline" is fundamentally racist.

We're digressing, but yes, halfbloed, gemengd bloed (mixed blood), it's all basically the same.

Just found out that mixed blood means mixed European and Native American ancestry specifically in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-blood).

I don't know if it's racist but it's definitely racial :)

And yet, you've got Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a pretty modern book. Of course, that's from the UK, which may have the more classical interpretation of half-blood.

Bloodlines sound more like something from royal families and the aristocracy, of which we still have a select few in NL. Baronesses and whatnot. Kinda posh.

I'm pretty sure the 'Half-Blood Prince' thing is supposed to sound racist in-universe, as that's someone of mixed heritage (magic and non-magic) referring to himself self-deprecatingly in a universe where racism against non-magical heritage is very much a real thing and a term like 'mudblood' is considered an extremely offensive racial slur.

Half-Blood is considered to be a huge insult in the books.

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