Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the genetic admixture that occurs among peoples of different races and among peoples of different ethnic groups. Historically, miscegenation has been socially controversial and subject to legal proscription in racist societies and in racialist societies that enforce racial segregation, hierarchical systems of racial caste, and a culture of social conservatism. In contemporary English usage, the synonyms for miscegenation include the words interethnic, mixed-race, multiethnic, multiracial, and interracial.
Etymology
The English word miscegenation derives from the Latin words miscere and genus. In Hispanoamerica, the term mestizaje derives from the word mestizo, 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, which also is the Latin root-word for the Spanish word mestizo. 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 with which the Spanish and the Portuguese colonists described and classified the racial lineages of the native peoples of colonial Hispanoamerica.In addition to the chattel slavery of Africans that existed until the late 19th century, the Portuguese caste system codified legal, social, and economic discrimination against the non-white natives of Brazil. Moreover, because interracial marriage was common from the time of the first Portuguese colonisers, that social circumstance allowed social mobility for “mixed-race” people, such as the Afro-Brazilians, by way of the socio-economic phenomenon of the “mulatto escape hatch”. Conversely, the non-white peoples whom the Spanish and the Portuguese classified in the population census as black, as brown, and as native thus were placed in great socio-economic disadvantage; hence, the usage of the term miscegenation creates and establishes an artificial, racialist difference of kind-and-quality between the white race and the non-white Other.
The similarities of denotation and connotation of the English term miscegenation and of the Spanish term mestizaje indicate that the terms race, race mixing, and multiracial function to establish a racialist difference of skin colour and physiognomy among the native peoples of the Americas; thus, mestizos are mixed-race people, usually of Amerindian ancestry, who do not identify as the Indians native to Hispanoamerica, however, the Canadian Métis people identify as a distinct ethnic group legally recognised as a native people of Canada.
The sociology indicates that interracial marriage often is disapproved of and discouraged by both the White community and the Black community, but to different degrees of opposition; that, unlike white people, Black people will more likely disapprove of interracial marriage as socially disruptive. 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 practised in the settler colonies of the European empires.
History
During the U.S. Civil War, 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, 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 realised 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 1858–59 U.S. 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, 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, 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 U.S. as an ethnic and racial smelting-pot. Moreover, in the racialist social politics of the civil-war era U.S., political usage of the term miscegenation was meant to provoke opposition to the civil war meant to free the slaves.
Anti-miscegenation Law
In the U.S., civil laws that proscribed "the mixing of the races" were enforced until 1967, yet remained black-letter law until the year 2000; in Nazi Germany the Nuremberg Laws were effective from 1935 until 1945; in Fascist Italy 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, the anti-miscegenation laws were in effect from 1949 until 1985.In the U.S. the anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between White Americans and Black people, Native Americans, and Asians. In the 17th century, the Maryland General Assembly criminalized interracial marriage in 1691. 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 U.S. Constitution was proposed and failed in 1871, the amendment was re-proposed in the 1912–1913 period and again in 1928. In 1967, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional by way of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws, specifically The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour 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 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 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 criminalized interracial sexual relations; in the event, both Acts were repealed in 1985.
Demographics of ethnoracial admixture
United States
According to the U.S. Census, 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.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. Asian American women and Asian American men who live with a white partner, 40 and 27 percent, respectively. 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. 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. 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. In 1980, just 17% of all respondents said they had dated someone from a different racial background.
File:BenToddJealousFamily.jpg|thumb|upright|Former NAACP President Ben Jealous, pictured here with his wife and daughter, is the son of a white father and a biracial mother.
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.
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.
According to studies by Jenifer L. Bratter and Rosalind B. King made publicly available on the Education Resources Information Center, White female-Black male and White female-Asian male marriages are more prone to divorce than White-White pairings. Conversely, unions between White males and non-White females have similar or lower risks of divorce than White-White marriages, unions between white male-black female last longer than white-white pairings or white-Asian pairings.