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Miscegenation
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Miscegenation (Latin miscere "to mix" + genus "kind") is the mixing of different racial groups, that is, marrying, cohabiting, having sexual relations and having children with a partner from outside one's racially or ethnically defined group.
Usage
The term "miscegenation" has been used since the nineteenth century to refer to interracial marriage and interracial sex, and more generally to the process of racial admixture, which has taken place since ancient history but has become more global through European colonialism since the Age of Discovery.
Discussion
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Encyclopedia
Miscegenation (Latin miscere "to mix" + genus "kind") is the mixing of different racial groups, that is, marrying, cohabiting, having sexual relations and having children with a partner from outside one's racially or ethnically defined group.
Usage
The term "miscegenation" has been used since the nineteenth century to refer to interracial marriage and interracial sex, and more generally to the process of racial admixture, which has taken place since ancient history but has become more global through European colonialism since the Age of Discovery. Historically the term has been used in the context of laws banning interracial marriage and sex, so-called anti-miscegenation laws. It is therefore a loaded word and is considered offensive by many.
Today, the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars, because the term suggests a distinct biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization imposed on certain relationships. The word is considered offensive by many and other terms such as "interracial," "interethnic" or "cross-cultural" are more common in contemporary usage. However, the term is still used by scholars when referring to past practices concerning multiraciality, such as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages.
In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words used to describe the mixing of races are mestizaje, mestiçagem and métissage. These words, much older than the term miscegenation, are derived from the Late Latin mixticius for "mixed" and from the Spanish word mestizo. Portuguese also uses miscigenação, derived from the same Latin root as the English word. 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. However, some groups in South America consider the use of the word mestizo offensive due to the fact that it was used during the times of the colony to just refer to the mixes between the conquistadores and the indigenous people. Today the mixes among races and ethnicities are diverse so it is preferable to use the term "mixed-race" or simply "mixed" (mezcla).
It should be mentioned that in Portuguese-speaking Latin America (i.e., Brazil), a much milder and mostly symbolic form of Caste system existed. In fact, miscegenation occurred significantly from the very first settlements, leading to high-ranking individuals of mixed ancestry. As a result, up to this day, the Brazilian classes system is drawn mostly around socio-economic lines, not racial ones (in a manner similar to other former Portuguese colonies).
The concept of miscegenation is tied to concepts of racial difference. As the different connotations and etymologies of miscegenation and mestizaje suggest, definitions of race, "race mixing" and multiraciality have diverged globally as well as historically, depending on changing social circumstances and cultural perceptions.
Thus, mestizo are people of mixed white and indigenous, usually Amerindian ancestry who do not self-identify as indigenous peoples or Native Americans. In Canada however, the Métis, who also have partly Amerindian and partly white, often French-Canadian, ancestry, are a constitutionally recognized aboriginal people.
The differences between related terms and words that encompass aspects of racial admixture show the impact of different historical and cultural factors leading to changing social interpretations of race and ethnicity. Thus the Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, equated class difference in eighteenth century France with racial difference. Borrowing Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", he showed his contempt for the lowest social class, the Third Estate, calling it "this new people born of slaves ... mixture of all races and of all times".
Etymological history
Miscegenation comes from the Latin miscere, "to mix" and genus, "kind". The word was coined in the U.S. in 1863, and the etymology of the word is tied up with political conflicts during the American Civil War over the abolition of slavery and over the racial segregation of African-Americans. The reference to "genus" was made to emphasize the supposedly distinct biological differences between whites and non-whites. In fact, all humans belong to the same genus, Homo, to the same species, Homo sapiens and to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.
The word was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War. The pamphlet was entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.
It purported to advocate the intermarriage of whites and blacks until they were indistinguishably mixed as a desirable goal, and further asserted that this was the goal of the Republican Party. The pamphlet was in fact a hoax, concocted by Democrats, to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them what were then radical views that offended against the attitudes of the vast majority of whites, including those who opposed slavery. There was already much opposition to the war effort, in New York in particular the opposition reached heights of the Draft Riots, that included numerous lynchings.
The pamphlet and variations on it were reprinted widely in both the North and the Confederacy by Democrats and rebels. Only in November 1864 was the pamphlet exposed as a hoax. The hoax pamphlet was written by David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a Democratic Party paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter.
By then, the word miscegenation had entered the common language of the day as a popular buzzword in political and social discourse. The issue of miscegenation, raised by the opponents of Lincoln, featured prominently in the election campaign of 1864.
In the United States, miscegenation has referred primarily to the intermarriage between whites and non-whites, especially blacks.
Before the publication of Miscegenation, the word amalgamation, borrowed from metallurgy, had been in use as a general term for ethnic and racial intermixing. A contemporary usage of this metaphor was 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. Opinions in the U.S on the desirability of such intermixing, including that between white Protestants and Irish Catholic immigrants, were divided. The term miscegenation was coined to refer specifically to the intermarriage of blacks and whites, with the intent of galvanising opposition to the war.
Laws banning miscegenation
Laws banning "race-mixing" were enforced in Nazi Germany, in South Africa during the early part of the Apartheid era and in certain individual U.S. states from the Colonial era until 1967. All these laws primarily banned marriage between spouses of different racially or ethnically defined groups, which was termed "amalgamation" or "miscegenation" in the U.S. The laws in Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid, and many of the U.S. state laws, also banned sexual relations between such individuals.
In the United States, the various state laws prohibited the marriage of whites and blacks, and in many states also the intermarriage of whites with Native Americans or Asians. In the U.S., such laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 until 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced such laws. Although an "Anti-Miscegenation Amendment" to the United States Constitution was proposed in 1871, in 1912–1913, and in 1928, no nation-wide law against racially mixed marriages was ever enacted. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. With this ruling, these laws were no longer in effect in the remaining 16 states that still had them.
The laws in U.S. states were established to maintain "racial purity" and white supremacy. Such was were passed in South Africa to prevent the white minority from being "bred-out" by a black majority.
The Nazi ban on interracial marriage and interracial sex was enacted in September 1935 as part of the Nuremberg Laws, the Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre (The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour). The Nuremberg Laws classified Jews as a race, and forbade marriage and extramarital sexual relations between persons of Jewish origin and persons of "German or related blood". Such intercourse was condemned as Rassenschande (lit. "race-disgrace") and could be punished by imprisonment (usually followed by deportation to a concentration camp) and even by death.
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in South Africa, enacted in 1949, banned intermarriage between different racial groups, including between whites and non-whites. The Immorality Act, enacted in 1950, also made it a criminal offense for a white person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race. Both laws were repealed in 1985.
History of ethnoracial admixture and attitudes towards miscegenation
Africa
Indian men, who have long been traders in East Africa, married many African women in 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. Basters and Coloureds in South Africa are the descendants of liaisons between the European men and indigenous African women. The Arab Slave Trade dealt with many black African women. These women and young girls were used by Arabs and other Asians as concubines, filling the harems of wealthy Muslims.
Asia
Inter-ethnic 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 Peninsula and Malay Archipelago, and they intermarried with the local Malay, Indonesian and Filipina female populations. This 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.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a network of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes being trafficked across Asia, in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and British India, in what was then known as the ’Yellow Slave Traffic’. There was also a network of prostitutes from continental Europe being trafficked to India, Ceylon, Singapore, China and Japan at around the same time, in what was then known as the ’White Slave Traffic’.
During World War II, Japanese soldiers engaged in war rape during their invasions across East Asia and Southeast Asia. The term "comfort women" is a euphemism for the estimated 200,000, mostly Korean and Chinese, women who were forced into prostitution in Japanese military brothels during World War II.
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 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 Muslim 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 groups as diverse as 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.
In Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, 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 soldiers to take local Indian wives, due to the lack of British women in India at the time. Their descendants are today known as Anglo-Indians. In addition to intermarriage, inter-ethnic prostitution in India was also fairly common at the time, when British officers would frequently visit Indian nautch dancers. Likewise, Indian lascar seamen taken to Britain also intermarried and cohabited with the local British females there. In the mid-19th century, there were around 40,000 British soldiers but less than 2,000 British officials present in India. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of women and girls from continental Europe and Japan were also trafficked into British India (and Ceylon), where they worked as prostitutes servicing both British soldiers and local Indian (and Ceylonese) men.
As British females began arriving to British India in large numbers from the early to mid-19th century, miscegenation became increasingly uncommon 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". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10-14 had been raped by the Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized as a false propoganda story by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion.
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 some restrictive policies were imposed on British females in order to "protect" them from miscegenation, most of these discriminatory policies were directed against native Indians. For example, the 1883 Ilbert Bill, which would have granted Indian judges the right to judge British offenders, was opposed by many British colonialists on the grounds that Indian judges cannot be trusted in dealing with cases involving English females. 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.
When Burma was ruled under the administration of British India, 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.
Japan
See also : Comfort women, Eugenics in Japan
Inter-ethnic marriage in Japan dates back to the 7th century, when Chinese and Korean immigrants began intermarrying with the local Japanese 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. 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. Intermarriage with the local populations in these Portuguese colonies also took place. Portuguese traders in Japan also frequently intermarried with the local Christian women.
From the the 15th century, Chinese, Korean and other Far Eastern visitors frequented brothels in Japan. This practice later continued among visitors from the "Western Regions", mainly European traders who often came with their South Asian lascar crew (in addition to some African crewmembers in some cases). This began with the arrival of Portuguese ships to Japan in the 16th century, when the local Japanese people assumed that the Portuguese 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.
Portuguese visitors and their South Asian (and sometimes African) crewmembers often engaged in slavery in Japan, where they brought or captured young Japanese women and girls, who were either used as sexual slaves on their ships or taken to Macau and other Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and India. Later European East India companies, including those of the Dutch and British, also engaged in prostitution in Japan.
In the early part of the Showa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenic policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers. Family Center staff also attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan, where they have established permanent residency, are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of the Yamato minzoku."
In 1928, journalist Shigenori Ikeda promoted the 21 December as the "blood-purity day" (junketsu de) and sponsored free blood-test at the Tokyo Hygiene laboratory. By early 1930s' detailed "eugenic marriage" questionnaires were printed or inserted in popular magazines for public consumption. Promoters like Ikeda were convinced that these marriage surveys would not only insure the eugenic fitness of spouses but also help avoid class differences that could disrupt and even destroy marriage. The goal was to create a database of individuals and their entire households which would enable eugenicists to conduct in-depth surveys of any given family's genealogy.
One of the last eugenic measure of the Showa regime was taken by the Higashikuni government. On 19 August 1945, the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish a prostitution service for allied soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated that : "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of the Showa era, we shall construct a dike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future...."
To prevent venereal diseases and rape by Japanese soldiers and to provide comfort to soldiers and head off espionage, the Imperial Japanese Army established "comfort stations" in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere where around 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, were recruited or kidnapped by the Kempeitai or the Tokeitai as comfort women.
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According to Peter Schrijvers in "The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II", rape "reflects a burning need to establish total dominance of the other" the enemy. According to Xavier Guillaume, US soldiers' rape of Japanese women was "general practice". Schrijvers states regarding rapes on Okinawa that "The estimate of one Okinawan historian for the entire three-month period of the campaign exceeds 10,000. A figure that does not seem unlikely when one realizes that during the first 10 days of the occupation of Japan there were 1,336 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by American soldiers in Kanagawa prefecture alone".
Japanese society, with its ideology of homogenity, has traditionally been intolerant of ethnic and other differences. Men or women of mixed ancestry, foreigners, and members of minority groups faced discrimination in a variety of forms. In 2005, a United Nations report expressed concerns about racism in Japan and that government recognition of the depth of the problem was not total. In 2005, Japanese Minister Taro Aso has called Japan a “one race” nation.
Korea
Inter-ethnic marriage in Korea dates back to the arrival of Muslims in Korea during the Middle Ages, when 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.
There are several Korean clans that are descended from such intermarriage unions. For example, the Deoksu Jang clan, claiming some 30,000 Korean members, view Jang Sunnyong, an Arab or Central Asian who married a Korean female, as their ancestor. Another clan, Gyeongju Seol, claiming at least 2,000 members in Korea, view a Central Asian (probably an Uyghur) named Seol Son as their ancestor. Another major Korean clan, the Chang family with its seat at Toksu village, also claims descent from a foreign Muslim family that settled in 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.
South Korea is among the world's most ethnically homogeneous nations. Koreans have traditionally valued an "unmixed blood" as the most important feature of Korean identity. The term "Kosian", referring to someone who has a Korean father and a non-Korean mother, is considered offensive by some who prefer to identify themselves or their children as Korean. Moreover, the Korean office of Amnesty International has claimed that the word "Kosian" represents racial discrimination. Kosian children, like those of other mixed-race backgrounds in Korea, often face discrimination. There are an estimated 35,000 mixed-raced South Koreans, most of them half Caucasian, according to the Pearl Buck Foundation. Discrimination is far worse against those who have African American fathers.
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%.
Myanmar / Burma
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.
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. Such intermarriage mostly took place around the Mindanao island area, but the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors to the Philippines abruptly halted the spread of Islam further north into the Philippines. Intermarriage with Spanish people later became more prevalent after the Philippines was colonized by the Spanish Empire.
When the Spanish colonized the Philippines, a significant portion of the Filipino population mixed with the Spanish. When the United States took the Philippines from Spain during the Spanish-American War, much intermixing of Americans, both white and black, took place on the island of Luzon where the USA had a Naval Base and Air Force Base even after the USA gave the Philippines independence after World War II. The descendants of Filipinos and Europeans are today known as Eurasians. Much mixing with the Japanese also took place due to the war rapes of Filipina women during World War II. Today there is an increasing number of Japanese men marrying Filipina woman and fathering children by them whose family remain behind in the Philippines and are financially supported by their Japanese fathers who make regular visits to the Philippines.
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.
While the French were not as concerned about interracial relationships, the British made attempts to prevent their Indian troops from engaging in such relationships with white females, by implementing curfews and preventing female nurses from servicing wounded Indian troops in British hospitals. On the other hand, French hospitals had no problem with having female nurses servicing wounded Indian and North African soldiers, though contacts with black African labourers and soldiers were more severely restricted by both British and French authorities.
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 Semitic Phoenicians and Carthaginians and the 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 Iranic Sarmatians and 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), when Byzantine Greeks also settled there, before the region was lost again to the Visigothic Kingdom less than a century later.
After the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 8th century, the Islamic state of Al-Andalus was established in the Iberian Peninsula. 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, under which anti-miscegenation laws were implemented in Spain.
Anyone whose ancestors had miscegenated with the Moors or Jews were persecuted by the Inquisition. The claim to universal hidalguía (lowest nobility) of the Basques was justified by erudites like Manuel de Larramendi (1690-1766) because the Arab invasion hadn't reached the Basque territories, so it was believed that Basques had maintained their original purity, while the rest of Spain was suspect of miscegenation. In fact, the Arab invasion also reached the Basque country and there had been a significant Jewish minority in Navarre, but the hidalguía helped many Basques to official positions in the administration.. In December 2008, an important genetic study revealed that the religious conversions of Jews and Muslims have had a profound impact on the population of the Iberian Peninsula. This study indicated a Sephardic Jewish mean admixture of about 20% and a North African admixture of about 11%.
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, Italians 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.
During World War II, France's Moroccan troops known as Goumiers committed war rapes in Italy after the Battle of Monte Cassino and in Germany. In Italy, victims of the mass rape committed after the Battle of Monte Cassino by Goumiers are known as Marocchinate. According to Italian sources, more than 7,000 Italian civilians, including women and children, were raped by Goumiers.
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 the women and girls often served in harems, some of whom married their Arab masters. When the Mongol Empire annexed much of Eastern Europe in the 13th century, the Mongols also intermarried with the local population and often engaged in war rape during the Mongol invasion of Europe.
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 ("Mother-Sultan"), 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.
The degree of miscegenation is very high in the former Soviet Union. Low levels of mixed ancestry are, in some areas (especially urban), almost universal, and generally go entirely ignored and unnoticed unless persons wish to identify themselves with ethnic minorities. Highly visible divergence from the local ethnic majority is also treated differently, depending on whether the individual identifies with the local culture or not. In modern times, attitudes towards miscegenation in the former Soviet Union vary greatly, depending on the race and gender of each partner. For example, unions between white/Slavic males and Asian/Oriental or Turkic women are almost universally tolerated, and their children are generally identified and treated as members of the local ethnic majority. However, unions between Slavic women and visibly non-Slavic men may meet varying degrees of discrimination, from light to none for Asian men (depending also on origin, whether they are immigrants or were born in the Soviet Union, and where in the Soviet Union they were born), to some hostility for Turkic men (although much of this is against their real or perceived Muslim faith) and Jews, and quite high intolerance towards those who marry blacks or have children with them (young African-Russians in Moscow are often scornfully called 'Children of the Olympics', under the assumption that they were conceived by visiting tourists during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games). The situation is also highly affected by self-identification, since many people of Asian or Turkic blood have assimilated to the point where they identify themselves as Russian/Ukrainian/etc., and are socially accepted as such.
United Kingdom
Britain has a fairly 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, who have Indian origins. The Romani in Britain intermarried with the local population and became known as the Romnichal. In India, the British East India Company encouraged marriages between European soldiers and Indian women. The offspring of these mixed marriages between the British and Indians were known as Anglo-Indians. Indian wives sometimes accompanied their husbands back to Britain.
Intermarriage was common in Britain since the 17th century, when the British East India Company began bringing over thousands of Indian scholars, lascars and workers (mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) to Britain, most of whom married and cohabited with local white British women and girls, due to the lack of Indian women in Britain at the time. This later became an issue, as a magistrate of the London Tower Hamlets area in 1817 expressed disgust at how the local English women and girls there were marrying and cohabiting almost exclusively with foreign South Asian lascars. Nevertheless, 'mixed' marriages were generally accepted in British society at the time, with no legal restrictions against inter-ethnic marriage. In addition to inter-ethnic marriage and cohabitation, inter-ethnic prostitution in the United Kingdom was also common at the time, when South Asian lascar seamen would frequently visit local British prostitutes, especially in the London Docklands area where white British and African-Caribbean sex workers specialized in entertaining Asian seamen, due to the clients in the area consisting almost entirely of foreign South Asian lascars, in addition to smaller numbers of Arab, Malaysian, Chinese and Greek seamen. Frequent intermarriage and cohabitation led to the breeding of “mixed race” Eurasian (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 Asian visitors in Britain, 51,616 of whom were lascar seamen (when World War I began).
Following World War I, there was a large surplus of females in Britain, and there were increasing numbers of seamen arriving from the Indian subcontinent, Arab World, Far East and Caribbean. This led to increased intermarriage and cohabitation with local white females, which raised 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, occasionally out of wedlock. They denounced white girls who mixed with 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.
Concerns were repeatedly voiced regarding white adolescent girls forming relationships with coloured men, including South Asian seamen in the 1920s, Muslim immigrants in the 1920s to 1940s, African American GIs during World War II, Maltese and Cypriot cafe owners in the 1940s to 1950s, Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s to 1960s, and South Asian immigrants in the 1960s. Such girls were 'wanted' by several police departments in the early 1960s and were described as: "frequents low class cafes and associates with Arabs and Pakistanis"; "good-looking and attractive, not of common appearance ... will almost certainly earn her living by prostitution and with Pakistanis"; "known to frequent low-class cafes and the houses of coloured men". White women who had relationships with black and Asian men were seen as 'mentally weak' or morally impaired, due to the stereotype of Caribbean and Pakistani men being a "criminal underclass".
Inter-ethnic relationships have become increasingly accepted over the last several decades. As of 2001, 2% of all marriages in Britain are inter-ethnic. Despite having a much lower non-white population (9%), mixed marriages in the United Kingdom are as common as in the United States. 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. As of 2009, one in 10 children in the UK lives in a mixed-race family and two out of five Chinese women have partners of a different race.
Middle East
Arabic World
Inter-ethnic sexual slavery was common during the Arab slave trade throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, when women and girls captured from non-Arab lands often ended up as sexual slaves in the harems of the Arab World. 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. It was also 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).
Inter-ethnic relationships were generally accepted in Arabic society 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 Man of Al-Yaman and His Six Slave-Girls" involves a Yemeni man's relationship with foreign slave girls, four of which are white, black, brown and yellow. Another Arabian Nights tale, "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.
Israel
The modern State of Israel was established as a nation-state for the Jewish people. In this context, being a Jew can be defined either by religious adherence, or the sense of a common lineage, which makes the definition of Jewish an ethno-religious concept. This is further confused by the rule in Halakha (Jewish religious law) that Jewish status is inherited, but from the mother only. Thus the child of a Jewish woman is born a Jew, regardless of whether mother or child adheres to the Jewish religion, or whether the father is a Jew, but the child of a non-Jewish woman is not born a Jew, unless she has formally converted to Judaism first. Traditional Orthodox Jews oppose such intermarriage.
Jewish miscegenation thus has two forms: marriage between Jew and non-Jew, and marriage between Jews of different races. It should be noted, while Jews may be of different races, genetic studies have proven that most Jews originate from a common ancestral Israelite population.
In Israel, all marriages must be performed by religious celebrants. Civil marriage does not exist in Israel, although it is legally recognized if it is performed abroad. Rules governing marriage are based on strict religious guidelines of each religion. By Israeli law, authority over all issues related to Judaism in Israel, including marriage, falls under the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel. Orthodox Judaism is the only form of Judaism recognized by the state, and marriages performed by non-Orthodox Rabbis in Israel are not recognized (although they are recognized if performed abroad). Halakha prohibits marriage of Jews to non-Jews. The Rabbinate in Israel will not perform a marriage between a halakhic Jew (one born of a Jewish mother or Jewish by conversion) to a non-Jew or to a "non-halakhic Jew", even if the latter is considered a Jew under Israeli civil law, such as a person of Jewish paternal descent. This is regardless of whether the halakhic Jew is Orthodox.
Multi-faith couples must get married outside of Israel to avoid this discrimination, most often in Cyprus.
Israeli law concerns itself with miscegenation based on ethnicity and religion, not miscegenation based on race. Therefore, there are no restrictions on interracial marriages between Jews of different Jewish ethnic divisions, or between other co-religionists of different races, although social stigma may still exist.
The only other option in Israel for the marriage of a Jew to a non-Jew, or for that matter, a Christian to a non-Christian or a Muslim to a non-Muslim, is for one partner to convert formally to the other's religion. A non-halakhic
Jew who wishes to marry a halakhic Jew must also convert formally to Judaism.
According to a Haaretz article "Justice Ministry drafts civil marriage law for ‘refuseniks’" 300,000 people are affected by these marriage restrictions.
Portuguese colonies
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. Thus, settlers often released African slaves to become their wives. The children were guaranteed full Portuguese citizenship, provided the parents were married. Some former Portuguese colonies have large mixed-race populations, for instance, Brazil, Cape Verde, Timor Leste, Macau and São Tomé and Príncipe. 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. Mixed marriages between Portuguese and locals in former colonies were very common in all Portuguese colonies. Miscegenation was still common in Africa until the independence of the former Portuguese colonies in the mid-1970s.
United States
Historically, "race mixing" between black and white people was taboo in the United States (see also Racism in the United States). In the past, the taboo centered more on white-black marriages than on sexual relations between whites and blacks, because most white Americans refused to accept African-Americans as social equals.
The taboo among American whites surrounding white-black intermarriage can be seen as a historical consequence of the oppression and racial segregation of African-Americans. In many U.S. states interracial marriage was already illegal when the term miscegenation was invented in 1863. The first laws banning interracial marriage were introduced in the late seventeenth century in the slave-holding colonies of Virginia (1691) and Maryland (1692). Later these laws also spread to colonies and states where slavery did not exist.
It has also been argued that the first laws banning interracial marriage were a response by the planter elite to the problems they were facing due to the socio-economic dynamics of the plantation system in the Southern colonies. The bans in Virginia and Maryland were established at a time when slavery was not yet fully institutionalized. At the time, most forced laborers on the plantations were indentured servants, and they were mostly white. Some historians have suggested that the at-the-time unprecedented laws banning interracial marriage were originally invented by planters as a divide and rule tactic after the uprising of servants in Bacon's Rebellion. According to this theory, the ban on interracial marriage was issued to split up the racially mixed, increasingly mixed-race labour force into whites, who were given their freedom, and blacks, who were later treated as slaves rather than as indentured servants. By forbidding interracial marriage, it became possible to keep these two new groups separated and prevent a new rebellion.
A sizable number of indentured servants in the British American colonies were also brought over from the Indian subcontinent by the East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries, when they faced similar treatment to other non-whites who intermarried in America. For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a "mulatto" and sold into slavery. Anti-miscegenation laws there continued into the early 20th century. For example, 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 considerable controversy in Arizona when an Indian farmer B. K. Singh married the sixteen year-old daughter of one of his white tenants.
During and after slavery, most American whites regarded interracial marriage between whites and blacks as taboo. However, during slavery many white American men and women did conceive children with black partners. These children automatically became slaves if the mother was a slave or were born free if the mother was free, as slavery was matrilineal. Some children were freed by their slave-holding fathers or bought to be emancipated if the father was not the owner. Many children of these unions formed enclaves under names such as Colored and Gens de couleur, etc. Most mixed-raced descendants merged into the African-American ethnic group during Jim Crow, while over the centuries a minority of mixed-raced Americans passed and became white, and others exist to this day in small mixed enclaves of Mestees such as the Melungeons, Redbones, Lumbee, Jackson Whites, etc. Genetic research suggests that a considerable minority of white Americans (estimated at 1/3 of the population by some geneticists such as Mark Shriver) has some distant African-American ancestry, and that the majority of black Americans have some European ancestry. Interestingly, marriage records show that in 60% of American white-black intermarriages, the woman is white, while mitochondrial DNA shows that only 40% of the European contribution to the African American genetic pool is from females.
After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, the intermarriage of white and black Americans continued to be taboo, especially but not only in the former slave states. The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, also known as Hays Code, explicitly stated that the depiction of "miscegenation... is forbidden."
One important strategy intended to discourage the marriage of white Americans and Americans of partly African descent was the promulgation of the one-drop theory, which held that any person with any known African ancestry, however remote, must be regarded as "black". This definition of blackness was encoded in the anti-miscegenation laws of various U.S. states, such as Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
Accusations of support for miscegenation were commonly made by slavery defenders against Abolitionists before the Civil War. After the War, similar charges were used by white segregationists against advocates of equal rights for African Americans. They were said to be secretly plotting the destruction of the white race through miscegenation. In the 1950s, segregationists alleged a Communist plot funded by the Soviet Union with that goal. In 1957, segregationists cite the anti-semitic hoax A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century as evidence for these bogus claims.
In 1958, the Christian fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, at the time a defender of segregation, in a sermon railed against integration, warning that it would lead to miscegenation, which would "destroy our [white] race eventually.".
In the United States, segregationists and Christian identity groups have claimed that several verses in the Bible, for example the story of Phinehas and the so-called "curse of Ham", should be understood as referring to miscegenation and that these verses expressly forbid it. Most theologians read these verses as forbidding inter-religious marriage, rather than inter-racial marriage.
However miscegenation has become increasingly accepted in the United States since the Civil Rights movement and up to the present day. The most notable American of mixed race is the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, who is the product of a "mixed" marriage between a black father and white mother.
Demographics of ethnoracial admixture
U.S.
According to the U.S. Census, in 2000 there were 1,432,908 Hispanic Origin-white marriages., 504,119 Asian-white marriages, 287,576 black-white marriages, 97,822 Hispanic Origin-black marriages, 40,317 Asian-Hispanic Origin marriages, and 31,271 Asian-black marriages.
Brazil
Multiracial Brazilians make up 42.6% of Brazil's population, 79.782 million people, and they live in all regions of Brazil. Multiracial Brazilians are mainly people of mixed European, African (Afro-Brazilian) and Amerindian ancestry.
Genetic studies of racial admixture
Miscegenation between two populations reduces the genetic distance between the populations. During the Age of Discovery which began in the early 15th century, European explorers sailed all across the globe reaching all the major continents. In the process they came into contact with many populations that had been isolated for thousands of years. It is generally accepted that the Tasmanian aboriginals were the most isolated group on the planet. They were driven to extinction by European explorers, however a number of their descendants survive today as a result of admixture with Europeans. This is an example of how modern migrations have begun to reduce the genetic divergence of the human race.
The demographic composition of the old world has not changed significantly since the age of discovery. However, the new world demographics were radically changed within a short time following the voyage of Columbus. The colonization of Americas brought Native Americans into contact with the distant populations of Europe, Africa and Asia. As a result many countries in the Americas have significant and complex multiracial populations. Furthermore many who identify themselves by only one race still have multiracial ancestry.
Admixture in the United States
Admixture in European-American population| % European Admixture | Frequency | | 90–100 | 68% | | 80–89.9 | 22% | | 70–79.9 | 8% | | 60–69.9 | < 1% | | 50–59.9 | < 1% | | 40–49.9 | < 1% | | 0–39.9 | 0 |
Today the vast majority of African-Americans possess varying degrees of European admixture (the average Black American is 20% European) although studies suggest the Native American admixture in Black Americans is highly exaggerated; some estimates put average African-American possession of European admixture at 25% with figures as high as 50% in the Northeast and less than 10% in the south. A recent study by Mark D. Shriver of a European-American sample found that the average admixture in the white population is 0.7% African and 3.2% Native American. However, 70% of the sample had no African admixture. The other 30% had African admixture ranging from 2% to 20% with an average of 2.3%. By extrapolating these figures to the whole population some scholars suggest that up to 74 million European-Americans may have African admixture in the same range (2-20%).
Dr Mark Shriver, the team leader of the study, found that he had 11% West African ancestry though he identifies as white. Studies based on skin reflectance have shown the color line in the US applied selective pressure on genes that code for skin color but did not apply any selective pressure on other invisible African genes. Since there are an estimated 6 genetic loci involved in skin color determination it is possible for someone to have 15-20% African admixture and not possess any of alleles that code for dark skin. This is the basis of the passing phenomena. Thus African admixture amongst white Americans can increase without any significant change in skin tone. Conversely amongst African-Americans, an amount of African Admixture is directly correlated with darker skin since no selective pressure is applied; as a result, African-Americans may have a much wider range of African admixture (>0-100%), where as European-Americans have a lower range (2-20%). A small overlap exists so that it is possible that someone who identifies themself as white may have more African admixture than a person who identifies themself as black.
A statistical analysis done in 1958 using historical census data and historical data on immigration and birth rates, concluded that 21 percent of the white population had black ancestors. The growth in the white population could not be attributed to births in the white population and immigration from Europe alone, but had received significant contribution from the African American population as well.
The author states in 1958:
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.
Admixture in Latin America
Background
Prior to the European conquest of the Americas the demographics of Latin America was naturally 100% American Indian. Today those who identify themselves as Native Americans are small minorities in many countries. For example Argentina's native population is 0.9%, Brazil is 0.4%, and Uruguay is 0%.
In addition many Africans were shipped to regions all over the Americas and were present in many of the early voyages of the conquistadors. Brazil has the largest population of African descendants outside Africa. Other countries such as Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador still have sizeable populations identified as Black. However countries such as Argentina and Chile do not have a visible African presence today. Census information from the early 19th century shows that people categorized as Black made up to 30% of the population, or around 400,000 people. Though almost completely absent today, their contribution to Argentine culture is significant include the Tango, the Milonga and the Zamba, words of Bantu origin.
The early conquest of Latin America was primarily carried out by male soldiers and sailors from Spain and Portugal. Since they carried very few European women on their journeys the new settlers married and fathered children with Amerindian women and also with women imported from Africa. This process of miscegenation was even encouraged by the Spanish monarchy and it led to the system of stratification known as the Casta. This system had Europeans (mainly Spaniards and Portuguese) at the top of the hierarchy followed by those of mixed race. Unmixed Blacks and Native Americans were at the bottom. A philosophy of whitening emerged in which Amerindian and African culture was stigmatized in favor of European values. Many Amerindian languages were lost as mixed race offspring adopted Spanish and Portuguese as their first languages. Only towards the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the twentieth century did large numbers of Europeans begin to migrate to South America and consequently altering its demographics.
| Demographics of Brazil from 1835 to 2000 |
|---|
| Year | White | Brown | Black |
|---|
| 1835 | 24.4% | 18.2% | 51.4% | | 2000 | 53.7% | 38.5% | 6.2% | |
The ideology of whitening encouraged non whites to seek white or lighter skinned partners. This dilution of non-white admixture would be beneficial to their offspring as they would face less stigmatization and find it easier to assimilate into mainstream society. After successive generations of European gene flow, non-white admixture levels would drop below levels at which skin color or physical appearance is not affected thus allowing individuals to identify as white. In many regions, the native and black populations were simply overwhelmed by a succession of waves of European immigration.
Historians and scientists are thus interested in tracing the fate of Native Americans and Africans from the past to the future. The questions remain about what proportion of these populations simply died out and what proportion still has descendants alive today including those who do not racially identify themselves as their ancestors would have. Admixture testing has thus become a useful objective tool in shedding light on the demographic history of Latin America.
Recent studies
Unlike in the United States there were no anti-miscegenation policies in Latin America. Though still a racially stratified society there were no significant barriers to gene flow between the three populations. As a result admixture profiles are a reflection of the colonial populations of Africans, Europeans and Amerindians. The pattern is also sex biased in that the African and Amerindian maternal lines are found in significantly higher proportions than African or Amerindian Y chromosomal lines. This is an indication that the primary mating pattern was that of European males with Amerindian or African females. According to the study more than half the white populations of the Latin American countries studied have some degree of either native American or African admixture (MtDNA or Y Chromosome). In countries such as Chile and Colombia almost the entire white population was shown to have some non-white admixture. Following the dispersal of Humans from Africa 50,000 - 70,000 years ago South America was the last continent to be occupied by humans. Thus the largest geographic distance between continents is between Africa and South America. Since genetic distance increases with geographic distance the two most genetically divergent groups are Africans and Native Americans based on distance. The arrival of Africans in Brazil and subsequent mixing with native South Americans entails the creation of intermediate populations, such as the Zambo or Garifuna between the two divergent groups.
Admixture in the 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 to and influence in the Philippines since the precolonial era. 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. 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. A recent genetic study by Stanford University indicates that at least 3.6% of the population are European or of part European descent from both Spanish and United States colonization.
Admixture among the Romani people
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. In the 1990s, it was discovered that Romani populations carried large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia, in addition to fairly significant frequencies of particular mitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally) that is rare outside South Asia.
47.3% of Roma men carry Y chromosomes of haplogroup H-M82 which is rare outside of the Indian subcontinent. Mitochondrial haplogroup M, most common in Indian subjects and rare outside Southern Asia, accounts for nearly 30% of Roma people. A more detailed study of Polish Roma shows this to be of the M5 lineage, which is specific to India. Moreover, a form of the inherited disorder congenital myasthenia is found in Romani subjects. This form of the disorder, caused by the 1267delG mutation, is otherwise only known in subjects of Indian ancestry. This is considered to be the best evidence of the Indian ancestry of the Romanies.
The Roma have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations", while a number of common Mendelian disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect". See also this table:
A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group". 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". The same study found that "a single lineage ... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males. A similar preservation of a highly resolved male lineage has been reported elsewhere only for Jewish priests". See also the Cohen Modal Haplotype.
A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Roma are "a founder population of common origins that has subsequently split into multiple socially divergent and geographically dispersed Gypsy groups". The same study revealed that this population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".
See also
Other sources
See esp.
External links
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