Miscegenation

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Miscegenation (/mɪˌsɛdʒəˈneɪʃən/ mih-SEJ-ə-NAY-shən) is marriage or admixture between people who are considered to be members of different races.^[1] The word, now usually considered pejorative, 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, a hoax 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 including Alabama had removed them from their laws. In the 21st century, newer scientific data shows that human populations are actually genetically quite similar. Studies show that races are more of an arbitrary social construct, and do not actually have a major genetic delineation.

Although the term "miscegenation" was formed from the Latin for "mixing races/kinds", 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,^[5] 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.