Miscegenation ( ) is genetic admixture between people who are members of different races or ethnicities. Long-term genetic and cultural admixture has been a widespread feature of human populations across much of the world, while only a few geographically or culturally isolated regions show limited historical intermixing. Historically, miscegenation has sometimes been subject to controversy or legal prohibition, typically in societies with strict racial/ethnic separation, systems of caste, or cultures of social conservatism. Adjectives describing miscegenation include "inter-ethnic", "mixed-race", "multiethnic", "multiracial", and "interracial".
Etymology The English word miscegenation derives from the Latin words ("to mix") and ("kind" or "lineage"). The misconception, occasionally encountered, that the mis in miscegenation derives from the English prefix , meaning "bad or wrong", is incorrect; the Latin term is etymologically unrelated and carries no such connotation.
History During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the word miscegenation became common usage in American English through the political propaganda pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1864), which advocated for racial admixture through black–white interracial marriage to create a racially homogeneous American people. In the course of senatorial and presidential party politics in 1864, the Democratic Party realized the miscegenation hoax in effort to discredit the Republican Party by imputing to them politically radical social policies that would offend the racial sensibilities of both the white-supremacist voters and the white abolitionist voters.
Throughout the 1858–1859 US Senate elections, the opponents of candidate Abraham Lincoln continually accused him and the Republican Party of advocating miscegenation as national policy. In the fourth of the Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858), candidate Lincoln stated his support for the Illinois law that prohibited "the marrying of white people with negroes". Despite the pro-miscegenation propaganda published against the abolitionist Republican Party in the Northern United States and in the Confederate States of America, after Lincoln's election to office in November 1864, the hoax-pamphlet was exposed as the work of the reporter George Wakeman and of David Goodman Croly, the managing editor of the New York World newspaper, who were associates of the Democratic Party.
In the early 19th century, before publication of the pamphlet Miscegenation (1864), the terms racial intermixing and amalgamation were the general synonyms for "the mixing of the races". In the opinion of the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the metaphoric usage of amalgamation describes the US as an ethnic and racial smelting-pot. Moreover, in the racialist social politics of the civil-war era US, political usage of the term miscegenation (black–white intermarriage) was meant to provoke opposition to the civil war meant to free the slaves.
In other languages In Hispanoamerica, the term mestizaje (miscegenation) derives from the word mestizo (a person born to an Amerindian and a Spaniard), hence the national populations of the countries that are Hispanoamerica usually are genetically 18 per cent Native American and 65.10 per cent Iberian in ancestry. The terms for racial mixing the Spanish mestizaje, the Portuguese mestiçagem, and the French métissage — derive from the Late Latin word mixticius (“mixed”), which also is the Latin root-word for the Spanish word mestizo (a man of mixed race). Moreover, Portuguese language also uses the term miscigenação, derived from miscere, the Latin root-word for the English word miscegenation. Historically, these racialist terms were functionally integral to the system of racial castes (casta) with which the Spanish and the Portuguese colonists described and classified the racial lineages of the native peoples of colonial Hispanoamerica.
The differences of denotation and connotation among the racialist terms confirm the malleability of the social interpretations of race and ethnic group, and confirm the observations of the Comte de Montlosier, who equated the social-class difference in 18th-century monarchical France with the racial-caste difference practiced in the settler colonies of the European empires.
Anti-miscegenation laws
In the US, civil laws that proscribed "the mixing of the races" were enforced until 1967; in Nazi Germany (1933–1945) the Nuremberg Laws were effective from 1935 until 1945; in Fascist Italy (1922–1945) the Italian racial laws were in effect from 1938 until 1944 and in the successor Italian Social Republic in effect from 1943 until 1945; and in post-war Apartheid South Africa (1948-1994), the anti-miscegenation laws were in effect from 1949 until 1985.
In the US, the anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between White Americans and Black people, Native Americans, and Asians. The Maryland General Assembly criminalized interracial marriage in 1691 being one of the first turning points for Anti-Miscegenation laws in the United States. In the 20th century, from 1913 until 1948, of the forty-eight states of the Union, thirty enforced their state laws against interracial marriage. Although an anti-miscegenation amendment to the US Constitution was proposed and failed in 1871, the amendment was re-proposed in the 1912–1913 period and again in 1928."Courtroom History" Lovingday.org Retrieved 28 June 2007 In 1967, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional by way of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).
In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws, specifically The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour (1935) prohibited interracial sexual relations and interracial marriages. According to the Nuremberg Laws, the Jews were classified as a race forbidden to have sexual relations and marriages with persons classified as Aryans, and with persons classified as non-Aryans. Violators of the laws were condemned as Rassenschande (guilty of shaming their race) and usually were imprisoned and then faced deportation to Nazi concentration camps for their eventual death.
In Apartheid South Africa, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) prohibited intermarriages between white south africans and any person of the many racial and ethnic groups who were the majority population of the country. The Immorality Act (1950) criminalized interracial sexual relations; in the event, both Acts were repealed in 1985.
Demographics of ethnoracial admixture
United States According to the US census,Hispanic Origin and Race of Coupled Households: 2000 U.S. Census. Retrieved 29 June 2007. in 2000 there were 504,119 Asian–white marriages, 287,576 black-white marriages, and 31,271 Asian–black marriages. The black–white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 403,000 in 2006, and 558,000 in 2010, according to Census Bureau figures.After 40 years, interracial marriage flourishing. NBC News. 15 April 2007.
In the United States, rates of interracial cohabitation are significantly higher than those of marriage. Although only 7 percent of married African American men have white American wives, 13% of cohabitating African American men have white American partners. 25% of married Asian American women have white spouses, but 45% of cohabitating Asian American women are with white American men. Of cohabiting Asian men, slightly over 37% of Asian men have white female partners over 10% married White American women.Degrading Stereotypes Ruin Dating Experience . Modelminority.com (22 October 2002). Retrieved 11 December 2011. Asian American women and Asian American men who live with a white partner, 40 and 27 percent, respectively (Le, 2006b). In 2008, of new marriages including an Asian man, 80% were to an Asian spouse and 14% to a White spouse; of new marriages involving an Asian woman, 61% were to an Asian spouse and 31% to a White spouse.Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang and Paul Taylor Marrying Out: One-in-Seven New U.S. Marriages Is Interracial or Interethnic . (PDF). Pew Research Center. 4 June 2010 Almost 30% of Asians and Latinos outmarry, with 86.8 and 90% of these, respectively, being to a white person. According to Karyn Langhorne Folan, "although the most recent census available reported that 70% of African American women are single, African American women have the greatest resistance to marrying 'out' of the race."
One survey revealed that 19% of black men had engaged in sexual activity with white women. A Gallup poll on interracial dating in June 2006 found 75% of Americans approving of a white man dating a black woman, and 71% approving of a black man dating a white woman. Among people between the ages of 18 and 29, the poll found that 95% approved of blacks and whites dating, and about 60% said they had dated someone of a different race."New generation doesn't blink at interracial relationships". USA Today (2 August 2006). 69% of Hispanics, 52% of non-Hispanic blacks, and 45% of non-Hispanic whites said they had dated someone of another race or ethnic group."Most Americans Approve of Interracial Dating". Gallup.com. 7 October 2005. In 1980, just 17% of all respondents said they had dated someone from a different racial background."Interracial and Cross Cultural Dating of Generation Y ". St. Cloud State University.
However, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley, using data from over 1 million profiles of singles from online dating websites, whites were far more reluctant to date outside their race than non-whites. The study found that over 80% of whites, including whites who stated no racial preference, contacted other whites, whereas about 3% of whites contacted blacks, a result that held for younger and older participants. Only 5% of whites responded to inquiries from blacks. Black participants were ten times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks, however black participants sent inquiries to other blacks more often than otherwise."In online dating, blacks more open to romancing whites than vice versa". Berkeley.edu 11 February 2011."Love Isn't Color-Blind: White Online Daters Spurn Blacks". Time. 22 February. 2011
Interracial marriage is still relatively uncommon, despite the increasing rate. In 2010, 15% of new marriages were interracial, and of those only 9% of Whites married outside of their race. However, this takes into account inter ethnic marriages, meaning it counts white Hispanics marrying non-Hispanic whites as interracial marriages, despite both bride and groom being racially white. Of the 275,000 new interracial marriages in 2010, 43% were white-Hispanic, 14.4% were white-Asian, 11.9% were white-black and the rest were other combinations. However, interracial marriage has become more common over the past decades due to increasing racial diversity, and liberalizing attitudes toward the practice. The number of interracial marriages in the United States increased by 65% between 1990 and 2000, and by 20% between 2000 and 2010. "A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another. ... Rates more than doubled among whites and nearly tripled among blacks between 1980 and 2008. But for both Hispanics and Asians, rates were nearly identical in 2008 and 1980", according to a Pew Research Center analysis of demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau."Marrying Out". Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang and Paul Taylor, Pew Research Center. 4 June 2010.