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Concept
Miscegenation
Summary
Miscegenation (mɪˌsɛdʒəˈneɪʃən ) is sexual relations or marriage between people who are considered to be members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms miscere ("to mix") and genus ("race"). The word first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, a hoax anti-abolitionist pamphlet David Goodman Croly and others published anonymously in advance of the 1864 presidential election in the United States. The term came to be associated with laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, which were known as anti-miscegenation laws.
Although the term "miscegenation" was formed from the Latin miscere "to mix" plus genus "race" or "kind", and it could therefore be perceived as being value-neutral, it is almost always a pejorative term which is used by people who believe in racial superiority or purity, and possibly intended to be negative in the erroneous belief that it derives from the prefix mis-. Less loaded terms for multiethnic relationships, such as interethnic or interracial marriage, and mixed-race, multiethnic, or multiracial people, are more common in contemporary usage.
In the present day, the use of the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars, because the term suggests that race is a concrete biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization which is imposed on certain relationships. The term's historical usage in contexts which typically implied disapproval is also a reason why more unambiguously neutral terms such as interracial, interethnic or cross-cultural are more common in contemporary usage. The term remains in use among scholars when referring to past practices concerning multiraciality, such as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages.
In Spanish, Portuguese, and French, the words used to describe the mixing of races are mestizaje, mestiçagem, and métissage.
Official source
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