Miscegenation

Miscegenation (/mɪˌsɛdʒəˈneɪʃən/ mih-SEJ-ə-NAY-shən) is a pejorative term for a marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races.^[1]

Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.

Etymology: The term miscegenation is derived from a combination of the Latin terms miscere ('to mix') and genus ('race' or 'kind').^[2]

The word first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, an anti-abolitionist pamphlet David Goodman Croly and others published anonymously in advance of the 1864 presidential election in the United States.^[2][3] The term came to be associated with laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, which were known as anti-miscegenation laws.^[4] These laws were overruled federally in 1967, and by the year 2000, all states had removed them from their laws, with Alabama being the last to do so on November 7, 2000. In the 21st century, newer scientific data shows that human populations are actually genetically quite similar. The scientific consensus is that race is an arbitrary social construct, and that it does not actually have a major genetic delineation, or indeed any scientific validity.^[5]