Miscegenation

Miscegenation ( mih-SEJ-ə-NAY-shən) 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 miscere ("to mix") and genus ("kind" or "lineage"). The misconception, occasionally encountered, that the mis in miscegenation derives from the English prefix mis-, meaning "bad or wrong", is incorrect; the Latin term miscere 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".