Miscegenation

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Dates of repeal of U.S. anti-miscegenation laws. Note a pattern?
  No anti-miscegenation laws passed
  Before 1887
  1948 to 1967
  12 June 1967, invalidated by Loving v. Virginia
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There was an Old Man of Jamaica,
Who suddenly married a Quaker;
But she cried out--'O lack!
I have married a black!'
Which distressed that Old Man of Jamaica.
—Edward Lear

Miscegenation (from the Latin miscere, meaning "mix," and gens, meaning "people") is a term that refers to romantic relationships, marriages, procreation or sexual liaisons between those perceived to be of different races or ethnicities. The term was coined by the authors of a hoax pamphlet in 1863 promoting the act.[1] In pr0n speak, it's "interracial," and it's remarkably popular.[note 1]

In history[edit]

Despite the exceedingly close genetic similarities between all known humans, the concept of miscegenation has become very widespread as a result of nationalist or religious pressure, and as a result of general racism, which traditionally promotes coherence between a defined group of people. Misleading interpretations of biology are also used to justify disapproval of miscegenation. For example, Adolf Hitler condemned mixed-race sexual unions in Mein Kampf in the 1920s, likening them to matings between different animal species, which produce weak or sterile offspring or none at all. (Ironically, promoting "purity" is most prone to producing "weak" offspring as genetic bottlenecking has shown - it preserves and amplifies genetic disorders and other undesirable genetic traits.)

While no longer promoted in most Westernized countries, anti-miscegenation doctrine lives on in North Korea (where all marriage and sexual contact with non-Koreans is banned - racial purity is state policy[2]) and in Saudi Arabia (where women may not marry non-Arabs without royal permission[3]) and figures into the citizenship laws of some countries like Egypt.[4] Some fundamentalist religious groups continue to decry miscegenation, particularly some fundamentalist Protestant denominations in the United States which refer to the "Curse of Ham"[note 2] as a justification for separating white from black. (As a result, miscegenation is a common theme in pornography due to the perception of outsiders being more sexually alluring and/or more powerful.)

The increasingly powerful Israeli anti-miscegenation group, Lehava, protests weddings between Palestinians and Jews that attract many hundreds of angry Lehava supporters.[5] (The Israeli government funds Lehava via its sister-organization Hemla.[6]) Late in 2015 the Israeli education ministry banned a novel about a romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian on the grounds that it encouraged miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews.[7]

The case which struck down miscegenation laws in the United States in 1967, Loving v. Virginia, became extremely influential in developing "substantive due process". Today, the fight against miscegenation legislation is often invoked as precedent in the current fight for same-sex marriage. In February 2014 this view gained some judicial sanction when Judge Arenda Wright Allen struck down Virginia's ban on same-sex marriages in an opinion which cited Loving frequently and at length.[8] However, since 2014, there has been a reaction against miscegenation from certain quarters. This view, that legalizing interracial marriage was a mistake, is by no means fringe among the American right.[9] Even senators have expressed this view, as recently as 2022.[10]

Racialism took on a unique form in Brazil during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. When Brazilian elites learned of "scientific" racism, they reversed the approach taken in other countries and promoted miscegenation as a means of "perfecting" the "inferior" races. They called this ideology "racial whitening". Anthropologists and historians believe that white supremacy led to an assimilative ideology in Brazil because the majority of its population consisted of black and mixed-race people (i.e., a mix of white, black, and native peoples) by the late-19th century, so segregation would have led to extreme difficulties. The majority of the population in Brazil today is still of mixed race,[11] probably dooming any return of white supremacy there.

In 2014 it was discovered that non-African living humans have DNA from archaic humans like Neanderthals in their genomes.[12]. Up until recently it was thought that Neanderthal DNA was not found in native Africans, but more recent genetic studies have found significant amounts of it. A newer study published in 2020 states that "Our results refine our understanding of Neanderthal ancestry in African and non-African populations and demonstrate that remnants of Neanderthal genomes survive in every modern human population studied to date"[13][14].This blatantly debunks the concept of "racial purity" and shows that miscegenation is natural among humans and beneficial as miscegenation broadens and diversifies the gene pool.

The New York Times reported in 2014 that the glorious government of everyone's favorite People's Republic was offering government payout for a miscengenated marriage, specifically, between a Chinese citizen of the Han ethnic group and a Chinese citizen of the Uyghur ethnic group.[15] This government policy preceded the Uyghur genocide by about three years, so one could presume that it was a prelude to ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Not that we'd know anything about that…
  2. Referring to Noah's curse on his voyeuristic son Ham (traditionally thought of as the Biblical ancestor of the peoples of Africa) and his apparently ne'er-do-well son Canaan in Genesis.

References[edit]