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Interracial marriage
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Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry, often creating multiracial children. This is a form of exogamy (marrying outside of one's social group) and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation (mixing of different racial groups in marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations).
he Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations banning or restricting interracial marriage in the past, including Germany during the Nazi period, South Africa under apartheid, and many states in the United States prior to the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia.
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Encyclopedia
Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry, often creating multiracial children. This is a form of exogamy (marrying outside of one's social group) and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation (mixing of different racial groups in marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations).
Legality of interracial marriage
In the Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations banning or restricting interracial marriage in the past, including Germany during the Nazi period, South Africa under apartheid, and many states in the United States prior to the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. In both Nazi Germany and certain American states, such laws have been linked to eugenics programs.
In many Arab countries, laws and customs continue to exist which revoke the civil rights of women who marry men not native to the woman's country of birth, or to men who are non-Muslim in particular. Women who follow through on this choice run a high risk of being subjected to honor killings by male family members. Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority retain laws in which violence against women on the grounds of "adultery" is condoned or mitigated by the legal systems. In 2008, Pakistani senators defended the practice of burying young women alive who were judged guilty by tribal elders of having engaged in a relationship with men not of their tribe.
According to the report of the Special Rapporteur submitted to the 58th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (2002) concerning cultural practices in the family that reflect violence against women (E/CN.4/2002/83), similar such legal situations where the law is interpreted to allow men to kill female relatives in a premeditated effort as well as for crimes of passions, in flagrante delicto in the act of committing adultery, include: Argentina, Equador, Iran, Israel, Peru and Venezuela.
United States
In Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Gunnar Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed by Southern Caucasian Americans on the freedom of African-Americans through racial segregation from the least to the most important: jobs, courts and police, politics, basic public facilities, "social equality" including dancing, handshaking, and most important, marriage. This ranking scheme seems to explain the way in which the barriers against desegregation fell. Of less importance was the segregation in basic public facilities, which was abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most tenacious form of legal segregation, the banning of interracial marriage, was not fully lifted until the last anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in 1967 by the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia.
Census Bureau statistics
The number of interracial marriages registered by the United States Census Bureau has continued to steadily increase since the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, but also continues to represent an absolute minority among the total number of marriages recorded. According to the 1993 Census, 310,000 interracial marriages were registered by 1970, 651,000 by 1980 and 1,161,000 by 1992, accounting for 0.7%, 1.3% and 2.2% of the total marriage numbers during those years, respectively. With the introduction of the "mixed-race" category, the 2000 census showed interracial marriage to be somewhat further widespread, accounting for 2,669,558 such marriages, or 4.9% of the total. These statistics do not take into account the mixing of ancestries within the same "race"; e.g. a marriage involving Indian and Japanese ancestries would not be classified as interracial due to the Census regarding both as the same category. Likewise, the Census Bureau does not consider Hispanic to be a race but an ethnicity. Consequently, Hispanic marriages with non-Hispanics are not registered as interracial if both partners are of the same race (i.e. a White Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic White partner).
Based on these statistics:
- Caucasian Americans are the least likely to marry interracially, although in absolute terms Caucasian Americans are involved in interracial marriages more than any other racial group. 1.9% of married Caucasian American women and 2.2% of married Caucasian American men have a non-Caucasian American spouse. 1.0% of married Caucasian American men are married to an Asian American woman, and 1.0% of married Caucasian American women are married to a man classified as "other".
- 3.7% of married African American women and 8.4% of married African American men have a non-African American spouse. 6.6% of married African American men, and 2.8% of married African American women, have a Caucasian American spouse. Only 0.1% of married African American women are married to an Asian American man, representing the least represented marital combination.
- There is a notable disparity in the rates of exogamy by Asian American males and females. Only 25% of Asian American/Caucasian American marriages involve an Asian American male and Caucasian American female, and only 15% of Asian American/African American marriages involve an Asian American male and a African American female. 19.5% of married Asian American women and 7.2% of married Asian American men have a non-Asian American spouse.
Interracial marriage by pairing
Asian and Caucasian
Marriages between Caucasian Americans and Asian Americans are becoming increasingly common for both genders in the United States (Lange, 2005), however marriages between Asian women and Caucasian men have continued to outnumber the reverse coupling by four to one, and in some urban regions by eight to one. In 1990, about 69 percent of married Asian American women aged between 18 and 30 were married to Asian American men, while 25 percent had Caucasian husbands. In 2006, 41 percent of Asian American-born women were registered as having Caucasian husbands, while 50 percent were married to Asian American men. C.N. Le estimated that the gender gap is smaller among the American-born or 1.5 generation Asian Americans; Asian Americans of both genders who are U.S.-raised are much more likely to be married to Caucasians than their non-U.S.-raised counterparts. Social enterprise research by the Columbia Business School between 2005-2007 concluded that the prevalence of Asian women-white men couples is a result of East Asian women not discriminating against white men during partner selection while they do against black and Hispanic men, causing Asian women-Caucasian men pairings to be the most common form of interracial dating and marriage in the United States. According to a 1998 Washington Post article, 36% of young Asian Pacific American men born in the United States married white women, and 45% of U.S.-born Asian Pacific American women took white husbands during the year of publication.
Not all Asian ethnicities have similar intermarriage patterns; for instance, Indian Americans were overwhelmingly endogamous, with only a small amount of outmarriage to other ethnic groups. The interracial marriage disparity for Indian Americans was low, with outmarriage to Caucasian Americans slightly higher for Indian American males, whereas all other major Asian groups had more outmarriage for women.
South Asians first arrived to the British American colonies as indentured servants brought over by the East India Company. Anti-miscegenation laws discouraging marriages between whites and non-whites were affecting South Asian immigrants and their spouses from the late 17th to early 20th century. For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a "mullato" and sold into slavery, and the Bengali revolutionary Tarak Nath Das's white American wife, Mary K. Das, was stripped of her American citizenship for her marriage to an "alien ineligible for citizenship." In 1918, there was controversy in Arizona when an Indian farmer married the sixteen year-old daughter of one of his white tenants.
African and Caucasian
Although mixed-race partnering has increased, the United States still shows disparities between African American male and African American female endogamy statistics. The 1990 census reports that 17.6% of African American marriages occur with Caucasian Americans. African American men are 2.5 times more likely to be married to Caucasian American women than African American women to Caucasian American men. In the 2006 census, 286,000 African American male to Caucasian American female and 117,000 Caucasian American male to African American female marriages were recorded. In 2007, 4.6% of married African Americans were married to a Caucasian American partner, and 0.4% of married Caucasian Americans were married to an African American.
Native American and Asian
Filipino Americans have frequently married Native American and Alaskan Native people. In the 17th century, when Filipinos were under Spanish rule, the Spanish colonists ensured a Filipino trade between the Philippines and the Americas. When the Mexicans revolted against the Spanish, the Filipinos first escaped into Mexico, then traveled to Louisiana, where the exclusively male Filipinos married Native American women. In the 1920s, Filipino American communities of workers also grew in Alaska, and Filipino American men married Alaskan Native women.. On the west coast, Filipino Americans married Native American women in Bainbridge Island, Washington..
"[I]n the 1920s Japanese men married Eskimo women throughout western Alaska." During the 1930s, there was relatively frequent intermarriage between Japanese Americans and Cherokee Indians in California, since these ethnic groups were introduced or hired as farm laborers and they worked together.
Asian and African
With African Americans and Asian Americans, the ratios are even further imbalanced, with 59.8% more Asian female/African male marriages than Asian male/African female marriages. However, C.N. Le estimated that Asian Americans of the 1.5 generation and of the five largest Asian American ethnic groups had African American male/Asian American female marriages 27.2% more than Asian American male/African American female relationships. Even though the disparity between African American and Asian American interracial marriages by gender is high according to the 2000 US Census, the total numbers of Asian American/African American interracial marriages are low, numbering only 0.22% percent for Asian American male marriages and 1.30% percent of Asian female marriages, partially contributed by the recent flux of Asian immigrants.
Historically, Chinese American men married African American women in high proportions to their total marriage numbers due to few Chinese American women being in the United States. After the Emancipation Proclamation, many Chinese Americans immigrated to the Southern states, particularly Arkansas, to work on plantations. The tenth US Census of Louisiana counted 57% of interracial marriages between these Chinese Americans to be with African Americans and 43% to be with Caucasian American women. After the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese American men had fewer potential ethnically Chinese wives, so they increasingly married African American women on the West Coast. In Jamaica and other Caribbean nations as well many Chinese males over past generations took up African wives, gradually assimilating or absorbing many Chinese descendants into the African Caribbean community or the overall mixed-race community.
Native American and Caucasian
The interracial disparity between genders among Native Americans is low. According to the 1990 US Census (which only counts indigenous people with US-government-recognized tribal affiliation), Native American women intermarried Caucasian Americans 2% more than Native American men married Caucasian American women.. Historically in Latin America, and to a lesser degree in the United States, Native Americans have married out at a high rate. Many countries in Latin America have large Mestizo populations; in many cases, mestizos are the largest ethnic group in their respective countries.
Native American and African
Interracial unions between Amerindians in Latin America is somewhat commonplace and there is a relatively large population of mixed African-Amerindian people in Latin America commonly called "Zambos" or "Cafusos". In the United States and Canada, interracial unions between American Indians and African-Americans has also been high throughout the 18th through early 20th century resulting in most African-Americans being a fraction American Indian.
See: Black Indians
Marriage squeeze
A term has arisen to describe the social phenomenon of the so-called "marriage squeeze" for African American females. The "marriage squeeze" refers to the fact that the most "eligible" and "desirable" African American men are marrying non-African American women at a higher rate, leaving African American women who wish to marry African American men with fewer partnering options. According to Newsweek, 43% of African American women between the ages of 30 and 34 have never been married. Several explanations of this phenomenon have been advanced by sociologists. It may be in part due to the still lingering effects of social ostracism, to which Caucasian American men who married African American women were heavily subjected in the past. It may also be the result of a desire among African American women to marry African American men due to concepts such as racial loyalty.
Education and interracial marriage
Using PUMS data from both the 1980 and 1990 US Census to determine trends within interracial marriage among Caucasian Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, it may be seen that endogamy (marrying within race) was more prevalent for African American men at lower education levels.
In 1980, the numbers were as follows: African American males without a high-school diploma participated in endogamy at 96.5%; for those who received a high-school diploma, 95.6%; for those with a college degree and above, the percentage of endogamy were 94.0%.Therefore, the total change in percentage among African American men with a college degree was merely 2.5%. The rates for African American women changed very little with different educational levels. For the African American woman who had not received a high school diploma the rate was 98.7%, high school diploma was 98.6%, with some college it was 98.2%, and college degree or higher, 98.5%. During this time there was a significant increase in marriages between Caucasians and African Americans, maintaining that African Americans are most likely to marry Caucasians over other groups.
The 1990 results show that rates of endogamy dropped for both males and females, albeit more for the African American male. In 1990, an African American male with a college degree and more was participating in endogamy at 90.4%; for an African American female with the same educational level, 96.4%. The results for the propensity of individuals at higher educational attainment levels to participate less in endogamy over the 10-year period were similar across races, including Caucasians, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.
Immigrants and interracial marriage
Racial endogamy is much stronger for immigrants as compared to natives. Immigrants of African descent are 4.9 times more likely than African Americans to marry within their race. Additionally, immigrants of African descent have the highest rates of endogamy of immigrants. African immigrants are much more likely to marry other same-race immigrants and African Americans, than to out-marry racially. Native-born Caucasian Americans are also 1.6 times more likely to marry a native-born African American than an immigrant of African descent. Female immigrants of African descent are more likely to marry native-born Caucasians than are their male counterparts.
Interracial marriage versus cohabitation
In the United States, rates of interracial cohabitation are significantly higher than those of marriage. Although only 7 percent of married African American men have Caucasian American wives, 13 percent of cohabitating African American men have Caucasian American partners. 25 percent of married Asian American women have Caucasian spouses, but 45 percent of cohabitating Asian American women are with Caucasian American men—higher than the percentage cohabitating with Asian men (44 percent). These numbers suggest that the prevalence of intimate interracial contact is greatly underestimated when one focuses only on marriage data.
Africa
Indian men have married many African women in Africa. Indians have long been traders in East Africa. The British Empire brought workers into East Africa to build the Uganda Railway. Indians eventually populated South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Zaire in small numbers. These interracial unions were mostly unilateral marriages between Indian men and East African women.
Arabic World
Interracial marriage between Arab men and their non-Arab harem slave girls was common in the Arab World during the Arab slave trade, which lasted throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. Most of these slaves came from places such as Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj), the Caucasus (mainly Circassians), Central Asia (mainly Tartars), and Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Saqaliba). The Barbary pirates also captured 1.25 million slaves from Western Europe and North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Outside of the Arabic World, it was also very common for Arab conquerers, traders and explorers to frequently intermarry with local females in the lands they conquered or traded with, in various different parts of Africa, Asia (see Asia section) and Europe (see Europe section).
From 839, Viking Varangian mercenaries who were in the service of the Byzantine Empire, notably Harald Hardrada, campaigned in North Africa, Jerusalem, and other places in the Middle East during the Byzantine-Arab Wars, and interbred with the local population through eventual settling or as spoils of warfare. There is archaeological evidence that Vikings had established contact with the city of Baghdad, at the time the center of the Islamic Empire, and connected with the populace there. Regularly plying the Volga with their trade goods (furs, tusks, seal fat, seal boats and notably female slaves; which was the one time in the history of the slave-trade when females were priced higher than males), the Vikings were active in the Arab slave trade at the time. These slaves (most often Slavs) were captured from Central and Eastern Europe, and sold to Arabic traders in Al-Andalus and the Emirate of Sicily.
Intermarriage was accepted in Arabic society for males, and was a fairly common theme in medieval Arabic literature and Persian literature. For example, the Kurdish poet Nezami, who himself had intermarried with his Kipchak slave girl, wrote The Seven Beauties (1196). Its frame story involves a Persian prince intermarrying with seven foreign princesses, including Byzantine, Chinese, Indian, Khwarezmian, Maghrebian, Slavic and Tartar princesses. Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, a 12th-century Arabic tale from Al-Andalus, was a love story involving an Iberian girl and a Damascene man. 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.
Asia
China
There have been various periods in the history of China where large numbers of Arabs, Persians and Turks from the "Western Regions" (Central Asia and West Asia) migrated to China, beginning with the arrival of Islam during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century. Due to the majority of these immigrants being male, they often intermarried with local Chinese females. While intermarriage was initially discouraged by the Tang Dynasty, it was later encouraged during the Song Dynasty, which allowed third-generation immigrants with official titles to intermarry with Chinese imperial princesses. Immigration to China increased under the Mongol Empire, when large numbers of West and Central Asians were brought over to help govern Yuan China in the 13th century.
By the 14th century, the total population of Muslims in China had grown to 4 million. After Mongol rule had been overthrown by the Ming Dynasty in 1368, this led to a violent Chinese backlash against West and Central Asians. In order to contain the violence, the Ming administration instituted a policy where all West and Central Asian males were required to intermarry with native Chinese females, hence assimilating them into the local population. Their descendants are today known as the Hui people.
South Asians have been living in Hong Kong throughout the colonial period, before the partition of India into the nations of India and Pakistan. They migrated to Hong Kong and worked as police officers as well as army officers during colonial rule. 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, Muslims of mixed Chinese and South Asian ancestry, descended from early Indian/Pakistani immigrants who took local Chinese wives and brought their children up as Muslims.
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent has a long history of inter-ethnic marriage dating back to ancient history. Various groups of people have been intermarrying for millennia in South Asia, including the Dravidian, Indo-Aryan(Iranian), Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman peoples. In addition, Indian traders, merchants and missionaries in Southeast Asia often intermarried with the local population there, while the Romani people ("Gypsies") who have origins in the Indian subcontinent travelled westwards and intermarried with the local populations in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Genetic studies show that the majority of Romani males carry large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia, in addition to nearly a third of Romani females carrying particular mitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally) that is rare outside South Asia. Around circa 800, a ship carrying Persian Jews crashed in India. They settled down in different parts of India and befriended and traded with the local Indian population. Intermarriage occurred, and to this day the Indian Jews physically resemble their surrounding Indian populations due to intermarriage.
In Goa during the late 16th and 17th centuries, there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders, who were either Japanese Christians fleeing anti-Christian in Japan, or young Japanese women and girls brought or captured as sexual slaves by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crewmembers from Japan. In both cases, they often intermarried with the local population in Goa.
During the British East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was initially fairly common for British officers and soldiers to take local Indian wives, and their descendants are today known as Anglo-Indians. Intermarriage was also common in Britain during the 17th to 19th centuries, when the British East India Company brought over thousands of Indian scholars, lascars and workers (mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) who settled down in Britain and took local British wives, some of whom went to India with their husbands. In the mid-19th century, there were around 40,000 British soldiers but less than 2,000 British officials present in India.
As British females began arriving to British India in large numbers around the early to mid-19th century, mostly as family members of British officers, intermarriage became increasingly uncommon among the British in India and was later despised after the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, where Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company. While incidents of war rape committed by Indian rebels against English women and girls were generally uncommon during the rebellion, this was exaggerated to great effect by the British media in order to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent.
At the time, British newspapers had printed various apparently eyewitness accounts of English women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, but with little physical evidence to support these accounts. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created in order to paint the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden". Despite the questionable authenticity of many colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of protecting English "female chastity" from the "lustful Indian male" had a significant influence on the policies of the British Raj in order to prevent racial miscegenation between the British elite and the native Indian population. While most of these discriminatory policies were directed against native Indians, some restrictive policies were also imposed on British females in order to "protect" them from miscegenation. In the aftermath of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, the long-held stereotype of Indian males as dark-skinned rapists lusting after white English females was challenged by several novels such as A Passage to India (1924) and The Jewel in the Crown (1966), both of which involve an Indian male being wrongly accused of raping an English female.
Japan
Inter-ethnic marriage in Japan dates back to the 7th century, when Chinese and Korean immigrants began intermarrying with the local population. By the early 9th century, over one-third of all noble families in Japan had ancestors of foreign origin. In the 1590s, over 50,000 Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan, where they intermarried with the local population. In the 16th and 17th centuries, around 58,000 Japanese travelled abroad, many of which intermarried with the local women in Southeast Asia.
Portuguese traders in Japan also frequently intermarried with the local Christian women in the 16th and 17th centuries. When the Portuguese first arrived, the local Japanese people assumed that they were from Tenjiku ("Heavenly Abode"), the Japanese name for the Indian subcontinent (due to its importance as the birthplace of Buddhism), and that Christianity was a new "Indian faith". These mistaken assumptions were due to the Indian city of Goa being a central base for the Portuguese East India Company and also due to a significant portion of the crew on Portuguese ships being Indian Christians.
During the anti-Christian persecutions in 1596, many Japanese Christians fled to Macau and other Portuguese colonies such as Goa, where there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders by the early 17th century. The Japanese slaves were usually young women and girls brought or captured by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crewmembers from Japan. Intermarriage with the local populations in these Portuguese colonies also took place.
In 2003, there were 36,039 international marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese in Japan - about one out of twenty marriages. About 80% of these interracial marriages involved a Japanese male marrying a foreign female (predominantly Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Thai and Brazilian), and 20% involve marriage to a foreign husband (predominantly Korean, American, Chinese, British and Brazilian).
Korea
International marriages now make up 13% of all marriages in South Korea. Most of these marriages are unions between a Korean male and a foreign female, from China, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, United States, Mongolia, Thailand, and Russia. On the other hand, Korean females have married foreign males from Japan, China, the United States, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, and Nepal. Between 1990 and 2005, there have been 159,942 Korean males and 80,813 Korean females married to foreigners.
Interracial marriage in Korea dates back to at least the Three Kingdoms period. Records about the period, in particular the section in the Samguk Yusa about the Gaya kingdom (it was absorbed by the kingdom of Silla later), indicate that in 48 AD, King Kim Suro of Gaya (the progenitor of the Gimhae Kim clan) took a princess from the "Ahyuta nation" (which is probably a transliteration of a major city in Southeast Asia) as his bride and queen.
Somewhat later, during the arrival of Muslims in Korea in the Middle Ages, Arab, Persian and Turkic navigators and traders settled in Korea and took local Korean wives. Some assimilation into Buddhism and Shamanism eventually took place, owing to Korea's geographical isolation from the Muslim world.
Southeast Asia
Interracial marriage in Southeast Asia dates back to the spread of Indian culture, including Hinduism and Buddhism, to the region. 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 Siam, the Malay Peninsula, and Malay Archipelago. Many Indianized kingdoms arose in Southeast Asia during the Middle Ages.
From the 9th century onwards, a large number of mostly male Arab traders from the Middle East settled down in the Malay Archipelago and intermarried with the local Malay, Indonesian and Filipina female populations, which contributed to the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia. From the 14th to the 17th centuries, many Chinese, Indian and Arab traders settled down within the maritime kingdoms of Southeast Asia and intermarried with the local female populations. This tradition continued among Portuguese traders who also intermarried with the local populations. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of Japanese people also travelled to Southeast Asia and intermarried with the local women there.
Burma / Myanmar
Burmese Muslims are the descendants of Bengalis, Indian Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Pathans, Chinese Muslims and Malays who settled and intermarried with the local Burmese population and other Burmese ethnic groups such as the Rakhine, Shan, Karen, and Mon.
The oldest Muslim group in Burma (Myanmar) are the Rohingya people, who are mostly descended from Bengalis who intermarried with the native females in the Rakhine State after the 7th century. When Burma was ruled by the British Indian administration, millions of Indians, mostly Muslim, migrated there. The mixed descendants of Indian males and local Burmese females are called "Zerbadees", often in a prejorative sense implying mixed race. The Panthays, a group of Chinese Muslims descended from West Asians and Central Asians, migrated from China and also intermarried with local Burmese females.
In addition, Burma has an estimated 52,000 Anglo-Burmese people, descended from British and Burmese people. Anglo-Burmese people frequently intermarried with Anglo-Indian immigrants, who eventually assimilated into the Anglo-Burmese community.
Malaysia and Singapore
In Malaysia and Singapore, the majority of inter-ethnic marriages are between Chinese and Indians. The offspring of such marriages are informally known as "Chindian", though the Malaysian government only classifies them by their father's ethnicity. As the majority of these intermarriages usually involve an Indian groom and Chinese bride, the majority of Chindians in Malaysia are usually classified as "Indian" by the Malaysian government. As for the Malays, who are predominantly Muslim, legal restrictions in Malaysia make it uncommon for them to intermarry with either the Indians, who are predominantly Hindu, or the Chinese, who are predominantly Buddhist and Taoist.
It is common for Arabs in Singapore and Malaysia to take local Malay wives, due to a common Islamic faith. The Chitty people, in Singapore and the Malacca state of Malaysia, are a Tamil people with considerable Malay descent, which was due to the first Tamil settlers taking local wives, since they did not bring along any of their own women with them. According to government statistics, the population of Singapore as of September 2007 was 4.68 million, of whom multiracial people, including Chindians and Eurasians, formed 2.4%.
Philippines
Historically, admixture has been an ever present and pervading phenomenon in the Philippines. The Philippines was originally settled by Australoid peoples called Negritos which now form the country's aboriginal community. Admixture occurred between this earlier group and the mainstream Malayo-Polynesian population.
There has been Indian migration and influence in the Philippines since the precolonial era. The impact of Indian civilization on the Philippines profoundly affected the culture of the Filipinos. About 25% of the words in the Tagalog language are Sanskrit terms and about 5% of the country's population possess Indian ancestry from antiquity. A considerable number of the population in the town of Cainta, Rizal, are descended from Indian soldiers who mutinied against the British Indian Army when the British briefly occupied the Philippines in 1762 to 1763. These Indian soldiers called Sepoy settled in town and intermarried with native females. The Sepoy ancestry of Cainta is very visible today, particularly in Barrio Dayap near Brgy. Sto Nino. Their unique physical characteristics make them distinct from the average Filipinos.
There has been a Chinese presence in the Philippines since the ninth century. However, large-scale migrations of Chinese to the Philippines only started during the Spanish colonial era, when the world market was opened to the Philippines. It is estimated that among Filipinos, 10%-20% have some Chinese ancestry and 1.5% are "full-blooded" Chinese.
According to the American anthropologist Dr. H. Otley Beyer, the ancestry of Filipinos is 2% Arab. This dates back to when Arab traders intermarried with the local Malay and Filipina female populations during the pre-Spanish history of the Philippines. Major Arab migration to the Philippines coincided with the spread of Islam in the region. Filipino-Muslim royal families from the Sultanate of Sulu and the Sultanate of Maguindanao claim Arab descent even going as far as claiming direct lineage from the prophet Mohammad. Filipinos with Arab descent are mainly confined to the island of Mindanao. Intermarriage with Spanish people later became more prevalent after the Philippines was colonized by the Spanish Empire.
A considerable number of the population in the town of Cainta, Rizal, are descended from Indian soldiers who mutinied against the British Indian Army when the British briefly occupied the Philippines from 1762 to 1763. These Indian soldiers called Sepoy settled in town and intermarried with native females. The Sepoy ancestry of Cainta is very visible today, particularly in Barrio Dayap near Brgy. Sto Nino. Their unique physical characteristics make them distinct from the average Filipinos.
Thousands of interracial marriages between Americans and Filipinos have taken place since the United States in turn took possession of the Philippines after the Spanish American War. Due to the strategic location of the Philippines, as many as 21 bases and 100,000 military personnel were stationed there since the U.S. first colonized the islands in 1898. These bases were decommissioned in 1992 after the end of the Cold War, but left behind thousands of Amerasian children. The Pearl S. Buck International foundation estimates there are 52,000 Amerasians scattered throughout the Philippines, who are often impoverished and socially ostracized because of their mixed racial/ethnic heritage, and/or who have been abandoned by one or both of their parents.
Because of the so-called "Mail Order Bride" services - a singles introduction between Westerners and Asians - thousands of marriages between Americans, Europeans and Australians have taken place with Asians-- mostly Filipinas. These Asians then go on to settle in the foreign land of their spouse. However, because most of these nations require strict proof that at least one of the participants has the ability to financially support the foreign spouse before they legalize such unions, the number of these marriages are somewhat limited, and can sometimes force the man or woman in question to move to the Asian nation instead, or, in some cases, leave the man and woman and possibly also their child(ren) separated from one another, restricting family reunions to periodic visits to either the Western or Asian country.
In the United States intermarriage among Filipinos with other races is common. They have the largest number of interracial marriages among Asian immigrant groups, as documented in California. It is also noted that 21.8% of Filipino Americans are of mixed blood, second among Asian Americans, and is the fastest growing.
Australia
In 2005 there were slightly more marriages by Australian resident women (13,079) to foreign-born partners than by Australian resident men (12,714). Australian-born male and female residents who married that year were most likely to have married an Australian-born partner (84.1% of marriages involving Australian men; 83.7% of marriages involving Australian females). Male Australian residents who were born in China and were married in 2005 were least likely to have married an Australian-born resident (only 3.1% of marriages involving a Chinese-born groom were to an Australian-born bride). Female Australian residents who were born in Vietnam and were married in 2005 were least likely to have married an Australian-born resident (only 15.7% of marriages involving a Vietnamese-born bride were to an Australian-born groom). Only 8.8% of males, and 11% of females, who were American-born Australian residents and married in 2005, married another person from the United States.
In terms of variance between brides and grooms from particular countries in marrying native Australians, 36.7% of brides but only 7.9% of grooms born in countries defined as 'North Asia' (Japan and Korea) who married in 2005 did so to an Australian-born partner. Conversely, 64.1% of grooms but only 43.8% of brides born in Lebanon who married in 2005 did so to an Australian-born partner.
Indigenous Australians have a high interracial marriage rate, many of whom come from mixed-race backgrounds themselves. A 2005 survey indicated that more than 28% of women of indigenous Australian descent were married to White Australian men, and 9% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men were married to White Australian women.
Europe
France
During World War I, there were 135,000 soldiers from British India, a large number of soldiers from French North Africa, and 20,000 labourers from South Africa, who served in France. Much of the French male population had gone to war, leaving behind a surplus of French females, many of whom formed interracial relationships with non-white soldiers, mainly Indian and North African. British and French authorities allowed foreign Muslim soldiers to intermarry with local French females on the basis of Islamic law, which allows marriage between Muslim males and Christian and Jewish females. On the other hand, Hindu soldiers in France were restricted from intermarriage on the basis of the Indian caste system.
According to France's 1999 Census, 38% and 34% of male and female married immigrants, respectively, are intermarried. The highest intermarriate rate was for European immigrants, mainly Spanish and Italian, nearly 50% of whom have had intermarriages. 30% of North African immigrants and 20% of Portuguese immigrants have also had intermarriages. The lowest intermarriage rate was for Turkish immigrants, with 14% for married males and 4% for married females.
Germany
According to the 2006 figures from Germany's Federal Statistics Office, Turkish men accounted for 14 percent of foreigners German women marry, followed by Italians and Americans. Conversely, German men marrying non-German women primarily choose Polish women, with Russian, Turkish and Thai women following in roughly equal numbers.
Comparative sociologist Amparo Gonzalez-Ferrer argues that one of the main reasons why Turkish men marry Germans more than Turkish women do is due to Islam permitting men but not women to marry non-Muslims. Dirk Halm, political scientist for the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen, remarked that considering Turkish citizens make up 25 percent of all foreign residents in Germany -- not counting an additional one-third ethnic Turks who are German citizens -- intermarriage rates in Germany are "in reality very low".
Iberian Peninsula
In ancient history, the Iberian Peninsula was frequently invaded by foreigners who intermarried with the native population. One of the earliest foreign groups to arrive to the region were the Indo-European Celts who intermarried with the pre-Indo-European Iberians in prehistoric Iberia. They were later followed by the Phoenician Carthaginians and Indo-European Romans who intermarried with the pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula during Classical Antiquity. They were in turn followed by the Germanic Visigoths, Suebi and Vandals and the Sarmatian Alans who also intermarried with the local population in Hispania during late Antiquity. In the 6th century, the region was reconquered by the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) before it was lost again to the Visigothic Kingdom less than a century later.
After the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early 8th century, the Islamic state of Al-Andalus was established in Iberia. Due to Islamic marital law allowing a Muslim male to marry Christian and Jewish females, it became common for Arab and Berber males from North Africa to intermarry with the local Germanic, Roman and Iberian females of Hispania. The offspring of such marriages were known as Muladi or Muwallad, an Arabic term still used in the modern Arab world to refer to people with Arab fathers and non-Arab mothers. This term was also the origin for the Spanish word Mulatto. In addition, many Muladi were also descended from Saqaliba (Slavic) slaves taken from Eastern Europe via the Arab slave trade. By the 11th or 12th century, the Muslim population of Al-Andalus had merged into a homogeneous group of people known as the "Moors". After the Reconquista, which was completed in 1492, most of the Moors were forced to either flee to Morocco or convert to Christianity. The ones who converted to Christianity were known as Moriscoes, and they were often persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition on the basis of the Limpieza de sangre ("Cleanliness of blood") or "blue blood" doctrine.
Italian Peninsula
As was the case in other regions conquered by Muslims, it was acceptable in Islamic marital law for a Muslim male to marry Christian and Jewish females in southern Italy when under Islamic rule between the 8th and 11th centuries. In this case, most intermarriages were between Arab and Berber males from North Africa and the local Greek, Roman and Italian females of Sicily and southern Italy. Such intermarriages were particularly common in the Emirate of Sicily, where one writer visiting the place in the 970s expressed shock at how common it was in rural areas. After the Norman conquest of southern Italy, all Muslim citizens (whether foreign, native or mixed) of the Kingdom of Sicily were known as "Moors". After a brief period of Arab-Norman culture had flourished under the reign of Roger II of Sicily, later rulers had forced the Moors to either convert to Christianity or be expelled from the kingdom.
In Malta, Arabs from neighbouring Sicily and Calabria intermarried with the local inhabitants, who were descended from Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Vandals. The Maltese people are descended from such unions, and the Maltese language is descended from Siculo-Arabic.
In the Republic of Venice in northern Italy, it was common for foreign Arab and Berber traders, known to Europeans as the "Moors", to take local Italian wives. This became a subject matter in several William Shakespeare plays, most notably Othello, involving an inter-ethnic relationship between a Moorish Othello and his Venetian wife Desdemona, based on Giovanni Battista Giraldi's "Un Capitano Moro" which was itself inspired by an actual incident that occurred in Venice around 1508. At times, the Italian city-states also played an active role in the Arab slave trade, where Moorish and Italian traders occasionally exchanged slaves. Leonardo da Vinci's mother Caterina, for example, was most likely a slave from the Middle East.
Normandy
The Normans were descended from Danish Vikings who were given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France—the Duchy of Normandy—in the 8th century. In that respect, descendants of the Vikings in western Europe continued to have an influence in northern Europe as well. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England who was killed during the Norman invasion in 1066, had Danish ancestors. Many of the medieval kings of Norway and Denmark married into English and Scottish royalty and occasionally got involved in dynastic disputes.
Southeastern and Eastern Europe
Vikings explored and eventually settled in territories in Slavic-dominated areas of Eastern Europe. By 950 AD, these settlements were largely Slavicized through intermarriage with the local population. Eastern Europe was also an important source for the Arab slave trade at the time, when Saqaliba (Slavic) slaves were taken to the Arab World where many often intermarried with their Arab owners. When the Mongol Empire annexed much of Eastern Europe in the 13th century, the Mongols also intermarried with the local population.
In the 11th century, the Byzantine territory of Anatolia was conquered by the Seljuq Turks, who came from Turkestan in Central Asia. Their Ottoman Turkish descendants went on to annex the Balkans and much of Eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Due to Islamic marital law allowing a Muslim male to marry Christian and Jewish females, it was common in the Ottoman Empire for Turkish males to intermarry with European females. For example, various sultans of the Ottoman Dynasty often had Greek (Rûm), Slavic (Saqaliba), Venetian, Caucasian and French wives. Some of these European wives exerted great influence upon the empire as Valide Sultan ("Sultan's Parent"), some famous examples including Roxelana, a Slavic harem slave who later became Suleiman the Magnificent's favourite wife, and Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, wife of Abdul Hamid I and sister of French Empress Josephine. Due to the common occurrence of such intermarriages in the Ottoman Empire, they have had a significant impact on the ethnic makeup of the modern Turkish population in Turkey, which now differs to that of the Turkic population in Central Asia.
United Kingdom
Britain has a long history of inter-ethnic marriage among the various European populations that inhabited the island, including the Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman peoples. Intermarriage with non-European populations began in the late 15th century, with the arrival of the Romani people ("Gypsies"), who have origins in the Indian subcontinent. The Romani in Britain intermarried with the local population and became known as the Romnichal.
Inter-ethnic marriage was fairly common in Britain since the 17th century, when the British East India Company began bringing over thousands of mostly male Indian scholars, lascars and workers (usually Bengali and/or Muslim), most of whom took local white British wives, largely due to a lack of Indian women in Britain at the time. This later became a concern, as a magistrate of the London Tower Hamlets area in 1817 expressed disgust at how the local English females there were marrying and cohabiting almost exclusively with foreign South Asian lascars, in addition to smaller numbers of Arab, Malaysian, Chinese and Greek seamen. Nevertheless, 'mixed' marriages were generally accepted in British society at the time, with no legal restrictions against intermarriage. This led to the breeding of “mixed race” Eurasian (mostly Anglo-Indian) children in Britain, which challenged the British elite efforts to "define them using simple dichotomies of British versus Indian, ruler versus ruled." By the mid-19th century, there were more than 40,000 Indian seamen, diplomats, scholars, soldiers, officials, tourists, businessmen and students arriving to Britain. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were around 70,000 South Asians in Britain, 51,616 of whom were lascar seamen (when World War I began). In addition, a number of British officers who had Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children in British India often brought them over to Britain in the 19th century.
Following World War I, there was a large surplus of females in Britain, and there were increasing numbers of seamen from the Indian subcontinent, Arab World, Far East and Caribbean. Many of them intermarried and cohabited with local white females, which raised increasing concerns over miscegenation and led to several race riots at the time. In the 1920s to 1940s, several writers raised concerns about an increasing 'mixed-breed' population, born mainly from foreign Muslim (Indian, Arab, Malaysian and Somali) fathers and local white mothers. They denounced white girls who married Muslim men as 'shameless' and called for a ban on the breeding of 'half-caste' children. By World War II, any form of intimate relationship between a white woman and non-white man was often considered offensive. As immigration increased after World War II, white females who married black and Asian males were seen as 'mentally weak' or morally impaired, due to the stereotype of Caribbean and Pakistani immigrants being a "criminal underclass" in the 1960s.
As of 2001, 2% of all marriages in the United Kingdom are inter-ethnic. Despite having a much lower non-white population (9%), mixed marriages are as common as in the United States. New Studies are being conducted by London South Bank University called Parenting 'Mixed' Children: Negotiating Difference and Belonging.
Interracial marriage gender disparities for certain groups
According to the UK 2001 census, black British males were around 50% more likely than black females to marry outside their race. British Chinese women (30%) were twice as likely as their male counterparts (15%) to marry someone from a different ethnic group. Among British Asians, referring mainly to South Asians, males were twice as likely to have an inter-ethnic marriage than their female counterparts. As of 2005, it is estimated that nearly half of British-born African-Caribbean males, a third of British-born African-Caribbean females, and a fifth of Indian and African males, have white partners.
Case of Seretse Khama
In 1948, an international incident was created when the British government took exception to the marriage of Seretse Khama, kgosi (king) of the Bamangwato people of what was then the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, to an English woman, Ruth Williams, whom he had met while studying law in London. The interracial marriage sparked a furore among both the tribal elders of the Bamangwato and the apartheid government of South Africa, who could not afford to have an interracial couple ruling just across their northern border, and who therefore immediately exerted pressure to have Khama removed from his chieftainship. Britain’s Labour government, then heavily in debt from World War II, could not afford to lose cheap South African gold and uranium supplies. There was also a fear that South Africa might take more direct action against Bechuanaland, through economic sanctions or a military incursion.
The British government therefore launched a parliamentary enquiry into Khama’s fitness for the chieftainship. Though the investigation reported that he was in fact eminently fit for the rule of Bechuanaland, "but for his unfortunate marriage",
the government ordered the report suppressed (it would remain so for thirty years), and exiled Khama and his wife from Bechuanaland in 1951. It took many years of exile before the couple was allowed to live in Africa, and several more years before Khama became president of what is now Botswana. Their son Ian Khama is presently the president of that country.
See also
External links
- Interracial Dating & Marriage Among Asian Americans
- Informational Site On Asian and Caucasian Romantic Relationships
- Official Website
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