Miscegenation

The pamphlet was a hoax, concocted by Democrats to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them what were then radical views that would offend the vast majority of whites, even those who opposed slavery.

In his fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln took great care to emphasize that he supported the law of Illinois which forbade "the marrying of white people with negroes".

Contemporary usage of the amalgamation metaphor, borrowed from metallurgy, was that of Ralph Waldo Emerson's private vision in 1845 of America as an ethnic and racial smelting-pot, a variation on the concept of the melting pot.

The term miscegenation was coined to refer specifically to the intermarriage of blacks and whites, with the intent of galvanizing opposition to the war.

[8][9] In the present day, the use of the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars because the term suggests that race is a concrete biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization which is imposed on certain relationships.

These non-English terms for "race-mixing" are not considered as offensive as "miscegenation", although they have historically been tied to the caste system (casta) that was established during the colonial era in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Intermarriage occurred significantly from the very first settlements to the present day, affording mixed people upward mobility in Brazil for Black Brazilians, a phenomenon known as the "mulatto escape hatch".

[13] To this day, there are controversies regarding whether the Brazilian class system would be drawn mostly around socioeconomic lines, not racial ones (in a manner similar to other former Portuguese colonies).

Conversely, people classified in censuses as black, brown ("pardo") or indigenous have disadvantaged social indicators in comparison to the white population.

Africa has had a long history of interracial mixing with non-Africans, since prehistoric times, with migrations from the Levant leading to significant admixture.

In Asia, countries like India, China, and Japan experienced interracial unions through trade, colonization, and migration, contributing to diverse genetic and cultural landscapes.

In Europe, Nazi Germany's anti-miscegenation laws sought to maintain "racial purity," specifically targeting Jewish-German unions.

Hungary and France saw mixed marriages through historical conquests and colonialism, such as between Vietnamese men and French women during the early 20th century.

Portuguese colonies encouraged mixed marriages to integrate populations, notably seen in Brazil and other territories, resulting in diverse, multicultural societies.

All of these laws primarily banned marriage between persons who were members of different racially or ethnically defined groups, which was termed "amalgamation" or "miscegenation" in the United States.

In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional via the Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868.

[46] According to some DNA researches, Brazilians predominantly possess some degree of mixed-race ancestry, though less than half of the country's population classified themselves as "pardos" in the census.

[47] Multiracial Brazilians live in all regions of Brazil, they are mainly people of mixed European, African, East Asian (mostly Japanese) and Amerindian ancestry.

Some estimates from studies indicated that many of the African-Americans who took part, had European admixture ranging from 25 to 50% in the Northeast and less than 10% in the South (where a vast majority of the population reside).

[50][51] A 2003 study by Mark D. Shriver of a European-American sample found that the average admixture in the individuals who participated was 0.7% African and 3.2% Native American.

Frudacas, Shriver's partner in DNA Print Genomics, contradicted him stating "Five percent of European Americans exhibit some detectable level of African ancestry.

"[54] Historians estimate that 58% of enslaved women in the United States aged 15–30 years were sexually assaulted by their slave owners and other White men.

[56] While publicly opposed to race mixing, in his Notes on the State of Virginia published in 1785, Jefferson wrote: "The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life".

[58] The author states in 1958: The data presented in this study indicate that the popular belief in the non-African background of white persons is invalid.

Other countries such as Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador still have sizeable populations identified as Black.

[63] Though almost completely absent today, their contribution to Argentine culture is significant and include the tango, the milonga and the zamba, words of Bantu origin.

This dates back to when Arab traders intermarried with the local Malay Filipina female populations during the pre-Spanish history of the Philippines.

[77] Genetic evidence has shown that the Romani people ("Gypsies") originated from the Indian subcontinent and mixed with the local populations in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

[83] Also the study pointed out that "genetic drift and different levels and sources of admixture, appear to have played a role in the subsequent differentiation of populations".

A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romani are "a founder population of common origins that has subsequently split into multiple socially divergent and geographically dispersed Gypsy groups".