Interracial marriage
The word, now usually considered pejorative, 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 published in 1864.
A 2008 study by Jenifer Bratter and Rosalind King conducted on behalf of the Education Resources Information Center examined whether crossing racial boundaries in the United States increased the risk of divorce.
[13][14] According to authors Stella Ting-Toomey and Tenzin Dorjee, the increased risk of divorce observed in couples with a White wife may be related to decreased support from family members and friends.
They note that White women were viewed as "unqualified" by their non-White in-laws to raise and nurture mixed race children, due to their lack of experience in "navigating American culture as a minority".
[15] In one study, White women married to Black men were more likely to report incidents of racial discrimination in public, such as inferior restaurant service or police profiling, compared to other interracial pairings.
Another recent study by Elena Stepanova (as cited in Latson[18]) found that a group of black, Latino, white and Asian college students rated mixed-race faces more attractive.
The first interracial marriage in the territory that would eventually become the United States took place in 1565 in St. Augustine, Florida: Luisa de Abrego, a free black woman, married Miguel Rodriguez, a Spanish man from Segovia.
[30] Before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the overwhelming majority of white evangelical Christians in the Southern United States saw racial segregation in marriage as something divinely instituted from God, and held that legal recognition of interracial couples would violate biblical teaching.
[111][112] Approval of interracial marriage has slowly increased in Trinidad and Tobago and one Chinese man reported that his Indian wife did not encounter any rejection from his parents when asked in a survey.
[194] Most of these enslaved peoples came from places such as sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj) the North Caucasus,[195] Central Asia (mainly Tatars), and Western, Southern and Southeastern Europe (mainly Slavs from Serbia – Saqaliba, Spain, France, Italy).
[198][199] From AD 839, Viking Varangian mercenaries who were in the service of the Byzantine Empire, notably Harald Sigurdsson, campaigned in North Africa, Jerusalem and other places in the Middle East during the Byzantine-Arab Wars.
The Arabian Nights tale of "The Ebony Horse" involves the Prince of Persia, Qamar al-Aqmar, rescuing his lover, the Princess of Sana'a, from the Byzantine Emperor who also wishes to marry her.
[citation needed] In Benin, meanwhile, the descendants of the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa and his harem of black consorts have contributed a number of prominent citizens.
[239] On Lamu Island off the Kenyan coast, local oral tradition maintains that 20 shipwrecked Chinese sailors with 400 survivors,[240] possibly part of Zheng's fleet, washed up on shore there hundreds of years ago.
[241][242][243] On Pate Island, Frank Viviano described in a July 2005 National Geographic article how ceramic fragments had been found around Lamu which the administrative officer of the local Swahili history museum claimed were of Chinese origin, specifically from Zheng He's voyage to east Africa.
Ernest John Eitel mentioned in 1889 how an important change had taken place among Eurasian girls, the offspring of illicit connections: instead of becoming concubines, they were commonly brought up respectably and married to Hong Kong Chinese husbands.
[279] Tanka women were ostracized from the Cantonese community, and were nicknamed "salt water girls" (ham shui mui) for their services as prostitutes to foreigners in Hong Kong.
25,000 of the Muslims in Hong Kong trace their roots back to Faisalabad in what is now Pakistan; around half of them belong to 'local boy' families, who descended from early Indian-Pakistani immigrants who took local wives mostly of Tanka origin.
There is also native-born wrestler Aja Kong, former professional basketball player Michael Takahashi and pop/R&B singer Thelma Aoyama who were all born to Japanese mothers and African-American fathers.
From the 1st century onwards, mostly male traders and merchants from the Indian subcontinent frequently intermarried with the local female populations in Cambodia, Burma, Champa, central Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
[citation needed] A Portuguese- and Malay-speaking Vietnamese woman who lived in Macao for an extensive period of time was the person who interpreted for the first diplomatic meeting between Cochinchina and a Dutch delegation.
It is accounted a piece of policy to do it; for the chief factors and captains of ships have the great men's daughters offered them, the mandarins' or noblemen's at Tunquin, and even the King's wives in Guinea; and by this sort of alliance the country people are engaged to a greater friendship; and if there should arise any difference about trade, or any thing else, which might provoke the native to seek some treacherous revenge, to which all these heathen nations are very prone, then these Dalilahs would certainly declare it to their white friends, and so hinder their countrymen's design.
In addition of the Dutch and the Portuguese, other European colonial settlers who arrived in the archipelago includes Germans, French, Danes, Flemish, Wallons, English, Scots, Poles, Swedes and Italians among many others.
The most famous intermarriage was between the Anglo-Indian resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick (who converted to Islam) and the Hyderabadi noblewoman, whose family claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, Khair-un-Nissa.
[365] The novel "Two Leaves and a Bud" by Ananda depicts labourer women in a tea garden in India being exploited by a British assistant manager Reggie Hunt who exercised illegal power and harassment that led to many run away just from seeing his presence.
Edgar Thurston described the colony of the Chinese men with their Tamil pariah wives and children: "Halting in the course of a recent anthropological expedition on the western side of the Nilgiri plateau, in the midst of the Government Cinchona plantations, I came across a small settlement of Chinese, who have squatted for some years on the slopes of the hills between Naduvatam and Gudalur, and developed, as the result of ' marriage ' with Tamil pariah women, into a colony, earning an honest livelihood by growing vegetables, cultivating coffee on a small scale, and adding to their income from these sources by the economic products of the cow.
According to Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist, miscegenation was commonplace in the Portuguese colonies, and was even supported by the court as a way to boost low populations and guarantee a successful and cohesive settlement.
In the case of Brazil, the influential "Indianist" novels of José de Alencar (O Guarany, Iracema, and Ubirajara) perhaps went farther than in the other colonies, advocating miscegenation in order to create a truly Brazilian race.
[425] Following the end of World War I, there were significantly more females than males in Britain,[426] and there were increasing numbers of sailors from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and the West Indies.
[431] In 1948, an international incident was created when the British government took exception to the "difficult problem"[432] of the marriage of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, whom he had met while studying law in London.
