Miscegenation

The term miscegenation first appeared during the American presidential election of 1864, although the concept of mestizaje existed in Latin America long before. The word appeared in a pamphlet written by two New York journalists who wanted to portray the incumbent president and Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln as an advocate of what was then known as “amalgamation.” Opponents of interracial sex found the term amalgamation inadequate because it had been borrowed from something else (metallurgy—the mixing of metals).

Tiger Woods refers to his ethnic makeup as “Cablinasian.” His racial mixture is Caucasian, African American, Native American, and Asian. His father was African American, and his mother was Thai. Today, miscegenation has become increasingly accepted.

Insisting that it was important to have an independent term, one that referred to the “mixture of two or more races” and nothing else, journalists David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a Democratic Party paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter, combined miscere (mix) and genus (race) to form the new, more scientific-sounding “miscegenation.” The pamphlet was titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The term miscegenation caught on quickly, providing, according to Peggy Pascoe, “the rhetorical means of channeling the belief that interracial marriage was unnatural into the foundation of post-Civil War white supremacy … the taken-for-granted basis of American laws and policy, the legal embodiment of the nearly unanimous White opposition to intermarriage.”

This opposition was fueled by the idea that race purity could and should be protected, and that racial mixture should be avoided at all costs. Scientists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and naturalists insisted that the races needed to be protected from intermixture, which was deemed a catastrophic mistake. The popular notion was that race existed as a quantifiable entity, something easily measured through blood standards and preserved through choice coupling.

Lawmakers reflected this belief in thwarting racial mixing, while preserving white supremacy, when they passed laws to define race, usually by blood quantum standards. Blood quantum measured race by a mathematical fraction of racial blood, the “blood-quantum standard.” In the south, it became known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person a black; it was also referred to as the law of hypodescent. One drop of black blood trumped seven drops of white blood, meaning that racially mixed persons were assigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American south to become the nation's definition. Offspring of interracial unions, oftentimes the result of planters raping their slaves in the antebellum era, were called mulattoes; although the root meaning of mulatto, in Spanish, is “hybrid,” mulatto came to include the children of unions between whites and “mixed Negroes.”

Anti-miscegenation laws were written to prohibit whites from marrying blacks, Asian Americans, and Indians, but not to prohibit blacks from marrying Asian Americans, or Asian Americans from marrying Indians. The essence of anti-miscegenation legislation was to preserve white racial purity above all else. This marriage of scientific and political rhetoric would reach its pinnacle in the writings of eugenicists and the tightening of miscegenation laws during the 1920s, most evident in the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

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