Miscegenation

Miscegenation (/mɪˌsɛdʒˈneɪʃən/; from the Latin miscere "to mix" + genus "kind") is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation.

The term miscegenation has been used since the 19th 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. Historically the term has been used in the context of laws banning interracial marriage and sex, known as anti-miscegenation laws. The term entered historical records during European colonialism and the Age of Discovery, but societies such as China and Japan also had restrictions on marrying with peoples whom they considered to be of a different race.

Usage

In the present day, the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars, because the term suggests a concrete biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization imposed on certain relationships. The term's historical use in contexts that typically implied disapproval is also a reason why more unambiguously neutral terms such as "interracial", "interethnic" or "cross-cultural" are more common in contemporary usage. The term remains in use among 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", which is also the root of 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. Some groups in South America, however, consider the use of the word mestizo offensive because it was used during the times of the colony to refer specifically to the mixing between the conquistadores and the indigenous people.

Today, the mixes among races and ethnicities are diverse, so it is considered preferable to use the term "mixed-race" or simply "mixed" (mezcla). In Portuguese-speaking Latin America (i.e., Brazil), a milder form of caste system existed, although it also provided for legal and social discrimination among individuals belonging to different races, since slavery for blacks existed until the late 19th century. Miscegenation occurred significantly from the very first settlements, with their descendants achieving high rank in government and society. To this day, the Brazilian class 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. 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, have identified as an ethnic group and are a constitutionally recognized aboriginal people. (In Canada these are referred to as Métis. A very famous one was Louis Riel.)

The differences between related terms and words which 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 18th-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, though all humans belong to the same genus, Homo, and the same species, Homo 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 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.

The pamphlet and variations on it were reprinted widely in both the north and south by Democrats and Confederates. 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 Abraham 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 that of Ralph Waldo Emerson's private vision in 1845 of America as an ethnic and racial smelting-pot, a variation on the concept of the melting pot. 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.

The concept of miscegenation

Franz Boas (considered to be the father of American cultural anthropology) as well as many of his students, such as Ashley Montagu, considered race to be an invalid concept. From this point of view, if the concept of race is invalid, then miscegenation as the crossing of races is equally invalid. These ideas are pursued in greater depth in Ashley Montagu's books on the subject.

Laws banning miscegenation

Main article: Anti-miscegenation laws

Laws banning "race-mixing" were enforced in certain U.S. states from 1691 until 1967, in Nazi Germany (the Nuremberg Laws) from 1935 until 1945, and in South Africa during the early part of the Apartheid era (1949–1985). All these laws primarily banned marriage between persons of different racially or ethnically defined groups, which was termed "amalgamation" or "miscegenation" in the U.S. The laws in Nazi Germany and many of the U.S. states, as well as South Africa, 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 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

Jean Ping the Deputy Prime Minister of Gabon who has a Chinese father and a black Gabonese mother was elected as Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union on 1 February 2008.

Jerry John Rawlings, the ex-President of Ghana is the son of a Scottish father and a black Ghanaian mother.

Africa has a long history of interracial mixing with Arabs and later European men having sexual relations with black African women as well as taking them as wives. Arabs played a big role in the African slave trade and unlike the trans-atlantic slave trade most of the black African slaves in the Arab slave trade were women. Most of them were used as sexual slaves by the Arab men and some were even taken as wives.

Sir Richard Francis Burton writes during his expedition to Africa about relationships between black women and white men. He writes, "The women are well disposed toward strangers of fair complexion, apparently with the permission of their husbands." There are several mulatto populations throughout Africa mostly the results of interracial relationships between Arab and European men and black women. In South Africa there are big mulatto communities like the Coloureds and Griqua formed by White colonists taking native African wives. In Namibia there is a community called the Rehoboth Basters formed by the interracial marriage of Dutch/German men and black African women.

In the former Portuguese Africa (now known as Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde) racial mixing between white Portuguese and black Africans was fairly common, especially in Cape Verde where the majority of the population is of mixed descent.

There have been some recorded cases of Chinese merchants and labourers taking African wives throughout Africa as many Chinese workers were employed to build railways and other infrastructural projects in Africa. These labour groups were made up completely of men with very few Chinese women coming to Africa.

In West Africa, especially Nigeria there are many cases of Lebanese men taking African women. Many of their offsprings have gained prominent positions in Africa. Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who has a Scottish father and a black Ghanaian mother became the President and Head of State of Ghana. Jean Ping, the son of a Chinese trader and a black Gabonese mother, became the Deputy Prime Minister as well as the Foreign minister of Gabon and was the Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union from 2009 to 2012. Current President of Botswana, Ian Khama, is the son of Botswana's first president, Seretse Khama and a white (British) woman, Ruth Williams.

Indian men, who have long been traders in East Africa, at times married among local African women. The British Empire brought many Indian 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.

Réunion

The majority of the population of Réunion is defined as mixed race. In the last 350 years, various ethnic groups (Africans, Chinese, English, French, Gujarati Indians, Tamil Indians) have arrived and settled on the island. There have been mixed race people on the island since its first permanent inhabitation in 1665.

Madagascar

Intermarriage between Chinese men and native Malagasy women was not uncommon. Several thousand Cantonese men intermarried and cohabited with Malagasy women. 98% of the Chinese traced their origin from Guangdong - more specifically, the Cantonese district of Shunde. For example, the census alone in 1954 census found 1, 111 "irregular" Chinese-Malagasy unions, and 125 legitimate, i.e., legally married. Registered by their mothers under a Malagasy name. Intermarriage between French men and Native Malagasy women was not uncommon either.

Americas

Canada

The 2006 Census counted 289,400 mixed unions (marriages and common-law unions) involving a visible minority person with a non-visible minority person or a person from a different visible minority group. This was a 33.1% increase from 2001. Among all mixed unions in 2006, 247,600 couples were in unions involving a visible minority person and someone who was not a visible minority. The groups most likely to be involved in a mixed union were Japanese (74.4%), Latin Americans (47%) and blacks (40.6%).

United States

See also: Race in the United States and Multiracial American

US President Barack Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

Historically, "race mixing" between black and white people was taboo in the United States. So-called anti-miscegenation laws, barring blacks and whites from marrying or having sex, were established in colonial America as early as 1691. The 1691 Virginia law was amended in 1705 to remove Indian-white from the prohibition. Thomas Jefferson's policy proposal for dealing with Native Americans was "to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people." He regretted in 1813 that white-Indian war had prevented this: “They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time.“

The taboo among American whites surrounding white-black 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 17th 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.

U.S States, by the date of repeal of anti-miscegenation laws:

  No laws passed

  Before 1887

  1948 to 1967

  12 June 1967

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 and Lumbee.

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. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, the marriage 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. The plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving became the historically most prominent interracial couple in the US through their legal struggle against this act.

Robert De Niro and his wife Grace Hightower. Census data showed 117,000 black wife-white husband couples in 2006.

In the mid 19th to 20th centuries, the Chinese that migrated were almost entirely of Cantonese origin. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese men in the U.S, mostly of Cantonese origin from Taishan migrated to the United States. Anti-miscegenation laws in many states prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women. After the Emancipation Proclamation, many intermarriages in some states were not recorded and 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. For example, in 1880, the tenth US Census of Louisiana alone counted 57% of interracial marriages between these Chinese Americans to be with African Americans and 43% to be with European American women. Between 20 and 30 percent of the Chinese who lived in Mississippi married black women before 1940. In mids 1850s, 70 to 150 Chinese were living in New York City and 11 of them married Irish women. In 1906 the New York Times (6 August) reported that 300 white women (Irish American) were married to Chinese men in New York, with many more cohabited. In 1900, based on Liang research, of the 120,000 men in more than 20 Chinese communities in the United States, he estimated that one out of every twenty Chinese men (Cantonese) was married to white women. In the 1960s census showed 3500 Chinese men married to White women and 2900 Chinese women married to White men.

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 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."

Asians were also specifically included in some state laws. California continued to ban Asian/white marriages until the Perez v. Sharp decision in 1948.

Tiger Woods refers to his ethnic make-up as "Cablinasian" (Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian) to describe the racial mixture he inherited from his African-American father and Thai mother.

In the United States, segregationists, including modern Christian Identity groups, have claimed that several passages in the Bible, for example the stories of Phinehas and of the so-called "curse of Ham," should be understood as referring to miscegenation and that certain verses expressly forbid it. Most theologians read these verses and references as forbidding inter-religious marriage, rather than inter-racial marriage.

Miscegenation has become increasingly accepted in the United States since the Civil Rights movement and up to the present day. Approval of mixed marriages in national opinion polls has risen from 4% in 1958, 20% in 1968 (at the time of the SCOTUS decision), 36% in 1978, to 48% in 1991, 65% in 2002, 77% in 2007 and 86% in 2011. 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. Nevertheless, as late as 2009, a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple, justifying the decision on grounds of concern for any children the couple might have.

Hawaii

The majority of Hawaiian Chinese were Cantonese migrants from Guangdong with a minority from Hakka. If all people with Chinese ancestry in Hawaii (including the Chinese-Hawaiians) are included, they form about 1/3 of Hawaii's entire population. Many thousands of them married women of Hawaiian, Hawaiian/European and European origin. A large percentage of the Chinese men married Hawaiian and Hawaiian/European women. The 12,592 Asiatic-Hawaiians enumerated in 1930 were the result of Chinese men intermarrying with Hawaiian and part Hawaiian/European. Most Asiatic-Hawaiians men also married Hawaiians and European women (and vice versa). On the census some Chinese with little native blood would be classified as Chinese, not as Asiatic-Hawaiians due to dilution of native blood. Intermarriage started to decline in the 1920s. Portuguese and other Caucasian women often married Chinese men. These unions between Chinese men and Portuguese women resulted in children of mixed Chinese Portuguese parentage, called Chinese-Portuguese. For two years ending 30 June 1933, 38 of these children were born; they were classified as pure Chinese because their fathers were Chinese. A large amount of mingling took place between Chinese and Portuguese, Chinese men married Portuguese, Spanish, Hawaiian, Caucasian-Hawaiian, etc. Only one Chinese man was recorded marrying an American woman. Chinese men in Hawaii also married Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Japanese, Greek, and half -white women.

Latin America

File:German Venezuelan Family.jpg

Racial mix: German mother (left), Venezuelan father -of German ancestry- (right) and their German Venezuelan daughter (center)

About 300,000 Cantonese coolies and migrants (almost all males) were shipped during 1849–1874 to Latin America; many of them intermarried and cohabited with the Black, Mestizo, and European population of Cuba, Peru, Guyana, and Trinidad.

About 100,000 Cantonese coolies (almost all males) during 1849–1874 migrated to Peru and intermarried with Peruvian women of Mestizo, European, Ameridian, European/Mestizo, African and mulatto origin. Thus, many Peruvian Chinese today are of mixed Chinese, Spanish, African, or Ameridian ancestry. One estimate for Chinese-Peruvian mixture is about 1.3–1.6 millions. Asian Peruvians are estimated to be 3% of the population, but one source places the number of citizens with some Chinese ancestry at 4.2 million, which equates to 15% of the country's total population.

120,000 Cantonese coolies (all males) entered Cuba under contract for 80 years, most did not marry, but Hung Hui (1975:80) states there was a frequency of sexual activity between black women and Cantonese coolies. According to Osberg, (1965:69) the Chinese often bought slave women and freed them, expressly for marriage. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese men (Cantonese) engaged in sexual activity with white Cuban women and black Cuban women, and from such relations many children were born. (For a British Caribbean model of Chinese cultural retention through procreation with black women, see Patterson, 322-31). In the 1920s an additional 30000 Cantonese and small groups of Japanese also arrived; both immigrations were exclusively male, and there was rapid mingling with white, black, and mulato populations. In the CIA World Factbook: Cuba. 2008. (15 May 2008) the authors estimated 114,240 people with Chinese-Cuban ancestry, and only 300 pure Chinese. In the study of genetic origin, admixture, and asymmetry in maternal and paternal human lineages in Cuba, thirty-five Y-chromosome SNPs were typed in the 132 male individuals of the Cuban sample. The study did not include any people with some Chinese ancestry. All the samples were White Cubans and Black Cubans. 2 out of 132 male samples belong to East Asian Haplogroup O2 which is found in significant frequencies among Cantonese people.

The Chinese in Costa Rica originated from the Cantonese male migrants. Pure Chinese make up only 1% of the Costa Rican population but according to Jacqueline M. Newman, as much as ten percent of the people in Costa Rica are Chinese, if we count the people who are Chinese, married to a Chinese, or of mixed Chinese descent. Ten percent of three and a half million is a sizable number. Most Chinese immigrants since then have been Cantonese, but in the last decades of the 20th century, a number of immigrants have also come from Taiwan. Many men came alone to work and married Costa Rican women and speak Cantonese. However the majority of the descendants of the first Chinese immigrants no longer speak Cantonese and think of themselves as full Costa Ricans. They married Tican women (who are a blend of European, Castizo, Mestizo, Indian, Black). A Tican is also a White person with small amount of non-white blood, like Castizo. The 1989 census shows about 98% of Costa Ricans were either White, Castizo, Mestizos, with 80% being White or Castizo.

Mulatto child of a white father and black mother, Mexico, 18th century

Around 20,000 mostly Cantonese (and some Hakka) coolies migrated to Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad. Many of them intermarried with Black women and East Indian women due to Chinese women being in short supply. Unlike in Trinidad Tobago and Guyana who were predominantly Cantonese men who intermarried with Black women and East Indian women. The Chinese who migrated to Jamaica and married Black women were mostly Hakka. According to the 1946 Census from Jamaica and Trinidad alone, 12,394 Chinese were found. 5,515 of those who lived in Jamaica were Chinese-Jamaicans, and another 3,673 were Chinese-Trinidadians living in Trinidad 4,061 local born, 5,515 Chinese colored (one Chinese parent). In Trinidad, there were 9,314: 2,366 China-born, 2,926 local born, 349 born abroad (from other colonies), 3,673 Chinese colored. In Jamaica and other Caribbean nations as well, over time, many Chinese males took up African wives, gradually assimilating or absorbing many Chinese descendants into the African Caribbean community or the overall mixed-race community. In Guyana, the Chinese were mostly Cantonese men. Because almost all of the Chinese indentured immigrants were men, they tended to intermarry with both East Indians and Africans, and thus the Chinese of Guyana did not remain as physically distinct as other groups. Their offspring also tended to intermarry with the local African and East Indian Guyanese rather than with the Chinese colored; as a result some Guyanese who have little Chinese ancestry are not included in the Census, and some may not know about their Chinese ancestry.

The Chinese who migrated to Mexico in the 19th to 20th centuries were almost entirely Cantonese men. They married Mexican women, which led to sentiments against Chinese; many were expelled, while those who were allowed to stay intermarried with the Mexican population. The Mexicali officials estimate that slightly more than 2,000 are full-blooded Chinese and about 8,000 are mixed-blood Chinese-Mexicans. Other estimates claim 50,000 residents—more than thought—who are of Chinese descent. Marriage of these people to full-blooded Mexicans is diluting the community further. Chinese Mexicans in Mexicali consider themselves equally “cachanilla,” a term used for locals, as any other resident of the city, even if they speak Cantonese in addition to Spanish. The sentiment against Chinese men was due to (and almost all Chinese immigrants in Mexico were men) stealing employment and Mexican women from Mexican men who had gone off to fight in the Revolution or in World War I. In San Luis Potosí, tests reveal 3.45% of O-M175, which is common marker among Chinese, East Asian, Southeast Asian and Central Asian.

Jamaica and Haiti

By some estimates, 80,000 North American and European women (most of them over the age of 40) visit Jamaica and Haiti every year for sex with young men (mostly in their 20s). They're called "milk bottles". HIV/AIDS infection rates in the Caribbean are much higher than in Canada or the U.S. Even so, female sex tourists in the Caribbean are not preoccupied by the risk. Many thousands of Chinese men (mostly Hakka) and Indian men married local Jamaican women. In the study of "Y-chromosomal diversity in Haiti and Jamaica: Contrasting levels of sex-biased gene flow." shows the paternal Chinese haplogroup O-M175 at a frequency of 3.8% in local Jamaicans ( non-Chinese Jamaicans) including the Indian H-M69 (0.6%) and L-M20 (0.6%) in local Jamaicans. Among the country's most notable Afro-Asians are reggae singers Sean Paul, Tami Chynn and Diana King.

Asia

Inter-ethnic marriage in Southeast Asia dates back to the spread of Indian culture, 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.

From the tenth to twelfth century, Persian women were to be found in Guangzhou (Canton), some of them in the tenth century like Mei Zhu in the harem of the Emperor Liu Chang, and in the twelfth century large numbers of Persian women lived there, noted for wearing mulitiple earrings and "quarrelsome dispositions". Multiple women originating from the Persian Gulf lived in Guangzhou's foreign quarter, they were all called "Persian women" (波斯婦 Po-ssu-fu or Bosifu). Some scholars did not differentiate between Persian and Arab, and some say that the Chinese called all women coming from the Persian Gulf "Persian Women". Genetic evidence shows Persian women intermarried with Cantonese men of Guangzhou. Yao Yonggang et al. reported that Kivisild detected one W mtDNA out of 69 Guangzhou Cantonese, a common Middle Easterner and Iranian marker.

The white men who sailed to Asia in the 16th century left a generation of mixed-race offspring that, at the high point of empire building, was more than one-million strong. Some 100,000 Amerasians stayed in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. During and after the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–1965) around 300,000 people, pre-dominantly Eurasians, left Indonesia to go to the Netherlands.

In the 19th century and early 20th century, there was a network of small numbers of Chinese 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’.

Rangoon, Burma. 8 August 1945. A young ethnic Chinese woman who was in one of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort stations" is interviewed by an Allied officer.

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 employed as prostitutes in Japanese military brothels during World War II. Some Dutch women, captured in Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery. More than 20,000 Indonesian women and nearly 300 Dutch women.

Sex tourism has emerged in the late 20th century as a controversial aspect of Western tourism and globalization. Sex tourism is typically undertaken internationally by tourists from wealthier countries. Author Nils Ringdal alleges that three out of four men between the ages of 20 and 50 who have visited Asia or Africa have paid for sex.

Female sex tourism also emerged in the late 20th century in Bali. Tens of thousands of single women throng the beaches of Bali in Indonesia every year. For decades, young Balinese men have taken advantage of the louche and laid-back atmosphere to find love and lucre from female tourists – Japanese, European and Australian for the most part – who by all accounts seem perfectly happy with the arrangement.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, thousands of eastern European women end up as prostitutes in China, Israel, and Turkey every year.

Central Asia

Today Central Asians are a mixed race of various peoples such as Mongols, Turkics, and Iranics. The Mongol invasion of Central Asia in the 13th century resulted in the massacre of the mostly white Iranic population and other Indo-European people with intermarriage and assimilation. Modern genetic studies show that Central Asian Turkic people and Hazara are an mixture of Northeast Asians and Indo-European people. Caucasian ancestry is prevalent in almost all central Asian Turkic people. Kazakhs, Hazara, Karakalpaks, and Crimean Tatars have more European maternal Mtdna than European paternal Y-dna while Kyrgyz have more European Y-dna with substantial European Mtdna. Other Turkic people like Uyghurs, Uzbeks, have mostly European Y-dna but also high percentages of European Mtdna. Turkmen have predominately European Y-dna and Mtdna.

Caucasus

The Nogais who live in Southern Russia/North Caucasus are a mixture of Mongoloid and Caucasoid and also have high frequencies of mongoloid paternal y-dna. Some North Caucasus ethnic groups also contain low to moderate frequencies of Mongolian paternal DNA such as haplogroup C-M217.

China

There have been various periods in the history of China where a number 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, some decided to intermarry with local Chinese females. Intermarriage was initially discouraged by the Tang Dynasty. In 836 Lu Chun was appointed as governor of Canton, he was disgusted to find Chinese living with foreigners and intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners. Lu enforced separation, banning interracial marriages, and made it illegal for foreigners to own property. Lu Chun believed his principles were just and upright. The 836 law specifically banned Chinese from forming relationships with "dark peoples" or "people of colour", which was used to describe foreigners, such as "Iranians, Sogdians, Arabs, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans", among others. The Song Dynasty allowed third-generation immigrants with official titles to intermarry with Chinese imperial princesses.

Iranian, Arab, and Turkic women also migrated to China and mixed with Chinese. From the tenth to twelfth century, Persian women were to be found in Guangzhou (Canton), some of them in the tenth century like Mei Zhu in the harem of the Emperor Liu Chang, and in the twelfth century large numbers of Persian women lived there, noted for wearing mulitiple earrings and "quarrelsome dispositions". Multiple women originating from the Persian Gulf lived in Guangzhou's foreign quarter; they were all called "Persian women" (波斯婦; Po-szu-fu or Bosifu). Genetic evidence shows Persian women intermarried with the Cantonese men of Guangzhou. Yao Yonggang et al. reported that Kivisild detected one W mtDNA out of 69 Guangzhou Cantonese, a common Middle Easterner and Iranian marker. Iranian female dancers were in demand in China during this period. During the Sui dynasty, ten young dancing girls were sent from Persia to China. During the Tang dynasty bars were often attended by Iranian or Sogdian waitresses who performed dances for clients.

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (Wudai) (907–960), there are examples of Persian women marrying Chinese emperors. Some Chinese officials from the Song Dynasty era also married women from Dashi (Arabia).

Of the Han Chinese Li family in Quanzhou, Li Nu, the son of Li Lu, visited Hormuz in Persia in 1376, married a Persian or an Arab girl, and brought her back to Quanzhou. He then converted to Islam. Li Nu was the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty reformer Li Chih.

By the 14th century, the total population of Muslims in China had grown to 4 million. After Mongol rule had been ended 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. 6.7% of Hui people's maternal genetics have a Caucasian origin, while slightly over 30% of paternal genetics also have a Caucasian origin. In the 19th century, the Hui rebelled against the Chinese government trying to create an independent state.

Han women who married Hui men became Hui, and Han men who married Hui women also became Hui.

In the frontier districts of Sichuan, numerous half Chinese-Tibetans were found. Tibetan women were glad to marry Chinese traders and soldiers. Some Chinese traders married Tibetan girls. Traders and officials in ancient times were often forbidden to bring Chinese women with them to Tibet, so they tended to marry Tibetan women; the male offspring were considered Chinese and female offspring as Tibetan. Special names were used for these children of Chinese fathers and Tibetan mothers. They often assimilated into the Tibetan population. Chinese and Nepalese in Tibet married Tibetan women.

In Qinghai, premarital sex between Tibetan girls and Han Chinese men was common; some Tibetan girls boasted of their sexual conquests of Han Chinese boys.

Chinese men also married Turkic Uyghur women in Xinjiang from 1880–1949. Sometimes poverty influenced Uyghur women to marry Chinese. These marriages were not recognized by local mullahs since Muslims women were not allowed to marry non-Muslim men under Islamic law. This did not stop the women because they enjoyed advantages, such as not being subject to Islamic law and they were not subjected to certain taxes. Uyghur women married to Chinese also did not have to wear a veil and they received their husband's property upon his death. These women were forbidden from being buried in Muslim graves. The children of Chinese men and Uyghur women were considered as Uyghur. Some Chinese soldiers had Uyghur women as temporary wives, and after the man's military service was up, the wife was left behind or sold, and if it was possible, sons were taken, and daughters were sold.

European travellers noted that many Han Chinese in Xinjiang married Uyghur (who were called turki) women and had children with them. A Chinese was spotted with a "young" and "good looking" Uyghur wife and another Chinese left behind his Uyghur wife and child in Khotan.

After 1950, some intermarriage between Han and Uyghur peoples continued. A Han married a Uyghur woman in 1966 and had three daughters with her, and other cases of intermarriage also continued.

Hong Kong

In the study of mitochondrial DNA control region variation in a population sample Irwin et al. found U2b mtDNA once, other U2 twice, H11 once and J1 once in 377 HKers which suggests 1.34% of West Eurasian female admixture in the Hong Kong Cantonese population. In the sample of 112 found 2 (or 1.78%) mtDNA Indo-European markers. These results do not give any information as to the extent of male European admixture in the Hong Kong population. Many Tanka women conceived children with foreign men. Ernest John Eitel mentioned in 1889 how an important change had taken place among Eurasian girls, the offspring of illicit connections: instead of becoming concubines, they were commonly brought up respectably and married to Hong Kong Chinese husbands. Many Hong Kong born Eurasians were assimilated into the Hong Kong society by intermarriage with the Cantonese population. A good example of a Cantonese Eurasian is Nancy Kwan, a Hollywood sex symbol. Kwan was of Eurasian origin, born in 1939 in Hong Kong to a father who was a Cantonese architect and mother who is a model of British and Scottish descent. The world's most influential martial artist icon Bruce Lee, had a Cantonese father and a Eurasian mother.

Main article: Tanka people

Ernest John Eitel controversially claimed that most "half caste" people in Hong Kong were descended exclusively from Europeans having relationship with Tanka women. The theory that most of the Eurasian mixed race Hong Kong people are descended only from Tanka women and European men, and not ordinary Cantonese women, has been backed up by other researchers who pointed out that Tanka women freely consorted with foreigners due to the fact that they were not bound by the same Confucian traditions as the Cantonese, and having a relationship with a European man was advantageous for Tanka women, but Lethbridge criticized it as "a 'myth' propagated by xenophobic Cantonese to account for the establishment of the Hong Kong Eurasian community". Carl Smith's study in late 1960s on the protected women seems, to some degree, to support Ernest John Eitel's theory. Smith says that the Tankas experienced certain restrictions within the traditional Chinese social structure. Being a group marginal to the traditional Chinese society of the Puntis (Cantonese), they did not have the same social pressure in dealing with Europeans. The ordinary Cantonese women did not sleep with European men, thus the Eurasian population was formed mostly from Tanka and European admixture.

They invaded Hongkong the moment the settlement was started, living at first on boats in the harbour with their numerous families, gradually settling on shore. They have maintained ever since almost a monopoly of the supply of pilots and ships' crews, of the fish trade and the cattle trade, but unfortunately also of the trade in girls and women. Strange to say, when the settlement was first started, it was estimated that some 2,000 of these Tan-ka people had flocked to Hongkong, but at the present time they are abont the same number, a tendency having set in among them to settle on shore rather than on the water and to disavow their Tan-ka extraction in order to mix on equal terms with the mass of the Chinese community. The half-caste population in Hongkong were, from the earliest days of the settlement of the Colony and down to the present day, almost exclusively the off-spring of these Tan-ka people. But, like the Tan-ka people themselves, they are happily under the influence of a process of continuous re-absorption into the mass of the Chinese residents of the Colony.

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.

Macao

The early Macanese ethnic group was formed from Portuguese men intermarrying with Malay, Japanese, Indian women. The Portuguese encouraged Chinese migration to Macao, and most Macanese in Macao were formed from intermarriages between Portuguese and Chinese. In 1810, the total population of Macao was about 4,033, of which 1,172 were white men, 1,830 were white women, 425 were male slaves, and 606 were female slaves. In 1830, the population increased to 4,480 and the breakdown was 1,202 white men, 2,149 white women, 350 male slaves and 779 female slaves. There is reason to speculate that large numbers of white women were involved in some forms of prostitution which would probably explain the abnormality in the ratio between men and women among the white population.

Rarely did Chinese women marry Portuguese; initially, mostly women from Goa, Siam, Indo China, or Malay, were brides of the Portuguese men in Macao. Many Chinese became Macanese simply by converting to Catholicism, and had no ancestry from Portuguese, having assimilated into the Macanese people. The majority of the early intermarriages of people from China with Portuguese were between Portuguese men and women of Tanka origin, who were considered the lowest class of people in China and had relations with Portuguese settlers and sailors, or low class Chinese women. Western men were refused by high class Chinese women, who did not marry foreigners. In fact, in those days, the matrimonial context of production was usually constituted by Chinese women of low socio-economic status who were married to or concubies of Portuguese or Macanese men. Very rarely did Chinese women of higher status agree to marry a Westerner. As Deolinda argues in one of her short stories, "even should they have wanted to do so out of romantic infatuation, they would not be allowed to. Macanese men and women also married with the Portuguese and Chinese; as a result some Macanese became indistinguishable from the Chinese or Portuguese population. Because the majority of the Chinese population who migrated to Macao was Cantonese, Macao became a Cantonese speaking society, and other ethnic groups became fluent in Cantonese. Most Macanese had paternal Portuguese heritage until 1974. It was in 1980s that Macanese and Portuguese women began to marry men who defined themselves ethnically as Chinese, which resulted in many Macanese with Cantonese paternal ancestry.

Literature in Macao was written about love affairs and marriage between the Tanka women and Portuguese men, like "A-Chan, A Tancareira", by Henrique de Senna Fernandes.

After the handover of Macao to China in 1999 many Macanese migrated to other countries. Of the Portuguese and Macanese women who stayed in Macao, many married with local Cantonese men, and so many Macanese also now have Cantonese paternal heritage. There are between 25,000–46,000 Macanese, but only 5000–8000 live in Macao, while most live in Latin America, America, Portugal. Unlike the Macanese of Macao who are strictly of Chinese and Portuguese heritage, many Macanese living abroad are not entirely of Portuguese and Chinese ancestry. Many Macanese men and women intermarried with the local population of America and Latin America and have only partial Macanese heritage.

Indian subcontinent

The Indian actress Katrina Kaif is the daughter of an Indian father and a British (English) mother.

"Lakmé", the Opera deals with the romantic relationship between a British Officer and an Indian Brahmin woman.

An oil painting of Khair-un-Nissa by George Chinnery. c. 1805. Begum Khair-un-Nissa was a Muslim Indian Hyderabadi noblewoman who fell in love and married the British Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick.

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 speakers of the Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages. Invading Greeks, Scythians, Huns, Persians, Mongols (known as Mughals), and Europeans took Indian wives.

3,000–8,000 years ago, Indo-European-speaking nomadic groups from Europe, the Near East, Anatolia, and the Caucasus migrated to India. According to 19th-century British historians, it was these "Aryans" who established the caste system, an elitist form of social organization that separated the "light-skinned" Indo-Aryan conquerors from the "conquered dark-skinned" indigenous Dravidian population through enforcement of "racial endogamy". Much of this was simply conjecture, fueled by British imperialism; British policies of divide and rule as well as enumeration of the population into rigid categories during the tenure of British rule in India contributed towards the hardening of these segregated caste identities. Since the independence of India from British rule, the British fantasy of an "Aryan Invasion and subjugation of the dark skinned Dravidians in India" has become a staple polemic in South Asian geopolitics, including the propaganda of Indophobia in Pakistan. There is no decisive theory as to the origins of the caste system in India, and globally renowned historians and archaeologists like Jim Shaffer, J.P. Mallory, Edwin Bryant, and others, have disputed the claim of "Aryan Invasion".

Some researchers claim that genetic similarities to Europeans were more common in members of the higher ranks. Their findings, published in Genome Research, supported the idea that members of higher castes are more closely related to Europeans than are the lower castes. According to the research, invading European populations were predominantly male who intermarried with local females and formed the upper castes, i.e., the local females had upward mobility in caste which was denied to local males. However, other researchers have criticized and contradicted this claim. A study by Joanna L. Mountain et al. of Stanford University concluded that there was "no clear separation into three genetically distinct groups along caste lines", although "an inferred tree revealed some clustering according to caste affiliation". A 2006 study by Ismail Thanseem et al. of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (India) concluded that the "lower caste groups might have originated with the hierarchical divisions that arose within the tribal groups with the spread of Neolithic agriculturalists, much earlier than the arrival of Aryan speakers", and "the Indo-Europeans established themselves as upper castes among this already developed caste-like class structure within the tribes." A 2006 genetic study by the National Institute of Biologicals in India, testing a sample of men from 32 tribal and 45 caste groups, concluded that the Indians have acquired very few genes from Indo-European speakers. More recent studies have also debunked the claims that so-called "Aryans" and "Dravidians" have a "racial divide". A study conducted by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2009 (in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT) analyzed half a million genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 ethnic groups from 13 states in India across multiple caste groups. The study establishes, based on the impossibility of identifying any genetic indicators across caste lines, that castes in South Asia grew out of traditional tribal organizations during the formation of Indian society, and were not the product of any Aryan invasion and subjugation of Dravidian people.

Rape and enslavement of Hindu women by invading Islamic armies was very common. For example, according to the Chachnama by Qazi Ismail, during the Arab invasion of Sindh (712 CE), Muhammad bin Qasim first attacked and conquered Debal. It was situated on the sea-coast (not far from modern Karachi). All males of the age of seventeen and upwards were put to the sword and their women and children were enslaved. 700 Hindu women, who were under the protection of Budh (that is, had taken shelter in the temple), were all captured with their valuable ornaments, and adorned with jewels. Muhammad dispatched one-fifth of the legal spoil to Hajjaj which included seventy-five damsels, while the other four-fifths were distributed among the soldiers. Thereafter, in whichever places he attacked like Rawar, Sehwan, Dhalila, Brahmanabad and Multan, Hindu soldiers and men with arms were slain, and many women of the higher classes immolated themselves in Jauhar. Most others became prizes for the victors. These women were enslaved and converted, and batches of them were dispatched to the Caliph in regular installments. For example, after Rawar was taken, many women and children were enslaved, of whom 30 were young ladies of royal blood. Muhammad Qasim sent all these to Hajjaj, who forwarded them to Walid, the Khalifa. He sold some of these female slaves of royal birth, and some he presented to others. In Northern India, female slaves captured after every campaign of the marching army were converted and married to Muslim soldiers who settled down in colonies established in places like Mansura, Kuzdar, Mahfuza, and Multan. During the Islamic involvement in India, it was normal for kings to possess harems filled with native Hindu women won as booties of war. The most famous one was of Akbar's harem, which had over 5000 women. Most of these Muslim soldiers were Turks, Afghans, Persians, Mongols (Mughals), other Central Asians, and Arabs.

There are even cases of Indian princesses marrying kings abroad. For example, the Korean text Samguk Yusa about the Gaya kingdom (it was absorbed by the kingdom of Silla later), indicates that in 48 AD, King Kim Suro of Gaya (the progenitor of the Gimhae Kim clan) took a princess (Princess Heo) from the "Ayuta nation" (which is the Korean name for the city of Ayodhya in North India) as his bride and queen. Princess Heo belonged to the Mishra royal family of Ayodhya. According to the Samguk Yusa, the princess had a dream about a heavenly fair handsome king from a faraway land who was awaiting heaven's anointed ride. After Princess Heo had the dream, she asked her parents, the king and queen of Ayodhya, for permission to set out and seek the foreign prince, which the king and queen urged with the belief that God orchestrated the whole fate. That king was no other than King Kim Suro of the Korean Gaya kingdom.

In Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, during the late 16th century and 17th century, there was a community of over thousand Japanese slaves and traders, who were either Japanese Christians fleeing persecution in Japan, or young Japanese women and girls brought or captured as sexual slaves by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crew members from Japan. In both cases, they often intermarried with the local population in Goa.

Interracial marriages between European men and Indian women were very common during colonial times. Most of these Indian women usually were Muslim belonging to aristocratic families and families with royal ancestry. According to the historian William Dalrymple, about one in three European men had Indian wives in colonial India. This was primarily because the Europeans (mostly Dutch, British, French and Portuguese and up to a lesser extent Swedes and Danes) came to India when they were young and there were very few white women available in India. The most famous of such interracial liaisons was between the Hyderabadi noblewoman Khair-un-Nissa and the Scottish resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick.

The 600,000-strong Anglo-Indian community was formed by British soldiers taking Indian women as wives. Such relationships have had a strong influence on the arts. Lakmé, an opera by the Frenchman Léo Delibes, deals with the romantic relationship between the British officer Gérald and the daughter of a Hindu high priest Lakmé (Laxmi in Sanskrit).

In Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), interracial relationships between Dutch, British and Portuguese men and local women were common. The 65,000-strong Burgher community was formed by the interracial marriages of Dutch and Portuguese men with local Sinhalese and Tamil women. 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. In the mid-19th century, there were around 40,000 British soldiers but fewer than 2,000 British officials present in India. Many British and other European officers had their own harems made up of Indian women similar to those the Nawabs and kings of India had. In the 19th century and early 20th century, thousands of women and girls from continental Europe 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 in British India in large numbers from the early-to-mid-19th century, interracial marriage became increasingly uncommon in India as British women increasingly disapproved of relationships between local woman and their men. Interracial relationships were also despised after the events of India's First War of Independence, where Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company.

The idea of protecting British 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 females and the native Indian male population. While some restrictive policies were imposed on British females in order to protect them from miscegenation, most of these policies were directed against native Indian males.

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 British females. In the aftermath of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, the long-held stereotype of Indian males as dark-skinned rapists lusting after white British 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 a British female.

When Burma was ruled under the administration of British India, millions of Indians, mostly Muslim, migrated there. The small population of mixed descendants of Indian males and local Burmese females are called "Zerbadees", often in a pejorative sense implying mixed race.

Japan

See also: Comfort women and Eugenics in Japan

Europeans accompanied by Japanese courtesans in Dejima, the Dutch trading colony in the harbor of Nagasaki, early 19th century.

Inter-ethnic marriage in Japan dates back to the 7th century, when Chinese and Korean immigrants began intermarrying with the local Japanese population. In the 1590s, over 50,000 Koreans were forcibly brought to Japan during Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea, where they intermarried with the local population. In the 16th and 17th centuries, around 58,000 Japanese travelled abroad, many of whom 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 intermarried with the local Christian women.

From 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. This began with the arrival of Portuguese ships to Japan in the 16th century. Portuguese visitors and their South Asian (and sometimes African) crewmembers often engaged in slavery in Japan, where they bought Japanese slaves who were then 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 Shōwa 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 21 December as the blood-purity day (junketsu de) and sponsored free blood tests at the Tokyo Hygiene laboratory. By the 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.

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.

One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa 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 Shōwa 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...."

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 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".

However, despite being told by the Japanese military that they would suffer rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Americans, Japanese civilians "were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy." According to Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power by Mark Selden, the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."

Japanese society, with its ideology of homogeneity, 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 realistic. In 2005, Japanese Minister Taro Aso called Japan a "one race" nation.

The Japanese public was thus astounded by the sight of some 45,000 so-called "pan pan girls" (prostitutes) fraternizing with American soldiers during the occupation. In 1946, the 200 wives of U.S. officers landing in Japan to visit their husbands also had a similar impact when many of these reunited couples were seen walking hand in hand and kissing in public. Both prostitution and marks of affection had been hidden from the public until then, and this "democratization of eroticism" was a source of surprise, curiosity, and even envy. The occupation set new relationship models for Japanese men and women: the practice of modern "dating" spread, and activities such as dancing, movies, and coffee were not limited to "pan pan girls" and American troops anymore, and became popular among young Japanese couples.

Korea

Inter-ethnic marriage in Korea dates back to the arrival of Muslims in Korea during the Middle Ages, when Persian and Turkic navigators, traders and slaves settled in Korea and married local Korean people. 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 intermarriages. For example, the Deoksu Jang clan, claiming some 30,000 Korean members, views Jang Sunnyong, a 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.

There are even cases of Korean kings marrying princesses from abroad. For example, the Korean text 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 (Princess Heo) from the "Ayuta nation" (which is the Korean name for the city of Ayodhya in North India) as his bride and queen. Princess Heo belonged to the Mishra royal family of Ayodhya. According to the Samguk Yusa, the princess had a dream about a heavenly fair handsome king from a far away land who was awaiting heaven's anointed ride. After Princess Heo had the dream, she asked her parents, the king and queen of Ayodhya, for permission to set out and seek the foreign prince, which the king and queen urged with the belief that God orchestrated the whole fate. That king was no other than King Kim Suro of the Korean Gaya kingdom.

6,423 Korean women married US military personnel as war brides during and immediately after the Korean War. The average number of Korean women marrying US military personnel each year was about 1,500 per year in the 1960s and 2,300 per year in the 1970s. Since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, nearly 100,000 Korean women have immigrated to the United States as the wives of American soldiers. Based on extensive oral interviews and archival research, Beyond the Shadow of the Camptowns tells the stories of these women, from their presumed association with U.S. military camptowns and prostitution to their struggles within the intercultural families they create in the United States.

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 usually from China, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, United States, Mongolia, Thailand, or 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 West Malaysia and Singapore, the majority of inter-ethnic marriages are between Chinese and Indians. The offspring of such marriages are informally known as "Chindian", although 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. Non-Muslims are required to convert to Islam in order to marry Muslims. However, this has not entirely stopped intermarriage between the Malays and the Chinese and Indians. There are more Indian-Malay marriages than there are Chinese-Malay ones; this has led to the emergence of a large Muslim Indian society that is most famously known for their 24-hour coffee shops and active involvement in the textile industry. The Muslim Chinese community, on the other hand, is small and has only a negligible impact on the socio-economy and demography of the region.

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%.

In the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, there have been many incidents of intermarriage between Chinese and native tribes such as the Murut and Dusun in Sabah, and the Iban and Bisaya in Sarawak. This phenomenon has resulted in a potpourri of cultures in both states where many people claiming to be of native descent have some Chinese blood in them, and many Chinese have native blood in them. The offspring of these mixed marriages are called 'Sino-(name of tribe)', e.g. Sino-Dusun. Normally, if the father is Chinese, the offspring will adopt Chinese culture and if the father is native then native culture will be adopted, but this is not always the case. These Sino-natives are usually fluent in Malay and English. A smaller number are able to speak Chinese dialects and Mandarin, especially those who have received education in vernacular Chinese schools.

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 some believe are descended from Bengalis who intermarried with the native females in the Rakhine State after the 7th century, but this is just a theory. When Burma was ruled by the British India administration, millions of Indians, mostly Muslim, migrated there. The small population of mixed descendants of Indian males and local Burmese females are called "Zerbadees", often in a pejorative 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

A Filipina bride and Nigerian groom walk down the aisle.

Historically, admixture has been an ever present and pervasive phenomenon in the Philippines. The Philippines were originally settled by Australoid peoples called Negritos (different from other australoid groups) which now form the country's aboriginal community. Some admixture may have occurred between this earlier group and the mainstream Malayo-Polynesian population.

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 1762-63. These Indian soldiers, called Sepoy, settled in towns and intermarried with native females. Cainta residents of Indian descent are very visible today, particularly in Barrio Dayap near Brgy. Sto Niño.

There has been a Chinese presence in the Philippines since the 9th 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 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 Muhammad. 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 US had a Naval Base and Air Force Base, even after the USA gave the Philippines independence after World War II. First children and descendants of male Filipino population with Spanish surnames who intermarried with white American female population may be considered Spanish mestizos. The descendants of Filipinos and Europeans are today known as mestizos, following the term used in other former Spanish colonies.

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. Today mixed-race marriages have a mixed perception in the Philippines. Most urban centers like Manila and Cebu are more willing to accept interracial marriages than rural areas.

Europe

Germany

Main articles: Anti-miscegenation laws § Nazi Germany, and Rassenschande

File:DHM - Stürmerplakat.jpg

Poster of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer (1935)

During the tempestuous years following World War I, the French Army occupied the Rhineland, utilising African soldiers amongst their forces. Their children were known as "Rhineland Bastards".

Beginning in 1933, the mainstream Nazi anti-Semitism considered the Jews as being a group of people bound by close, so-called genetic (blood) ties, to form a unit, which one could not join or secede from. The influence of Jews had been declared to have a detrimental impact on Germany, in order to justify the discriminations and persecutions of Jews. To be spared from those, one had to prove one's affiliation with the group of the Aryan race, as conceived by the Nazis.

It was paradoxical that neither genetic tests nor allegedly racial outward features in one's physiognomy determined one's affiliation, although the Nazis talked a lot about physiognomy, but only the records of the religious affiliations of one's grandparents decided it. However, while earlier the grandparents had still been able to choose their religion, their grandchildren in the Nazi era were compulsorily categorised as Jews, thus non-Aryans, if three or four grandparents had been enrolled as members of a Jewish congregation, regardless of whether the persecuted themselves were Jews according to the Halachah (roughly meaning: Jewish by birth from a Jewish mother or by conversion), apostates, irreligionists or Christians.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 forbade persons racially regarded as so-called Aryans and non-Aryans to marry; this included all marriages where at least one partner was a German citizen. Non-Aryans comprised mostly Jewish Germans and Gentile Germans of Jewish descent. However, Germans of extra-European and especially of African descent and Germans regarded as belonging to the minority group of Sinti and Roma were also considered as non-Aryans.

Eventually children – whenever born – within a mixed marriage, as well as children from extramarital mixed relationships born until 31 July 1936, were discriminated against as Mischlinge. However, children later born to mixed parents, not yet married as at the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, were to be discriminated against as Geltungsjuden, regardless of whether the parents had meanwhile married abroad or remained unmarried. Eventually children who were enrolled in a Jewish congregation were also subject to discrimination as Geltungsjuden.

Geltungsjuden were subjected to varying degrees of forced labour in 1940, partly ordered for all Jewish-classified spouses, either only for Jewish-classified husbands or only exempting Jewish-classified wives taking care of minor children. No documents indicate the exemption of a mixed marriage and especially of its Jewish-classified spouse from some persecutions.

Systematic deportations of Jewish Germans and Gentile Germans of Jewish descent started on 18 October 1941. German Jews and German Gentiles of Jewish descent living in mixed marriages were in fact mostly spared from deportation. In the event that a mixed marriage ended by the death of the so-called Aryan spouse or the divorce of the Jewish-classified spouse, the Jewish-classified spouse residing within Germany was usually deported soon after unless the couple still had minor children not counted as Geltungsjuden.

Boris Becker with Barbara Feltus in 1992

In March 1943 an attempt to deport the Berlin-based Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent, living in non-privileged mixed marriages, failed due to public protest by their in-laws of so-called Aryan kinship (see Rosenstraße protest). Also the Aryan-classified husbands and Mischling-classified children (starting at the age of 16) from mixed marriages were taken by the Organisation Todt for forced labour, starting in autumn 1944.

A last attempt, undertaken in February/March 1945, ended because the extermination camps were already liberated. However, 2,600 from all over the Reich were deported to Theresienstadt, of whom most survived the last months until their liberation.

All foreign workers brought to Nazi Germany were treated as a danger to German blood. Particularly with the OST-Arbeiters — Poles, Ukrainians, or Russians, all sexual relations were severely punished. Hundreds of Polish men were executed for their relations with German women.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 the laws banning so-called mixed marriages were lifted again. If couples who had already lived together during the Nazi era had remained unmarried due to the legal restrictions then got married after the war, their date of marriage was legally retroactively backdated if they wished it to the date they formed a couple. Even if one spouse was already dead, the marriage could be retroactively recognised. In the West German Federal Republic of Germany 1,823 couples applied for recognition, which was granted in 1,255 cases.

It is estimated that up to 7,000 postwar German children with black GI fathers and white German mothers were adopted by Americans.

Hungary

The Avars, Asiatic nomads who during the late 6th and 7th centuries had formed an extensive empire largely inhabited by conquered Slavs, made the agricultural Slavs pay taxes, and used their wives and daughters as concubines.

The Hungarians are thought to have originated in an ancient Finno-Ugric population that originally inhabited the forested area between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. At the time of the Magyar migration in the 10th century, the present-day Hungary was inhabited by Slavs, numbering about 200,000, who were either assimilated or enslaved by the Magyars.

During the Russian campaign in the 13th century, the Mongols drove some 40,000 Cuman families, a nomadic tribe, west of the Carpathian Mountains. The Iranian Jassic people came to Hungary together with the Cumans after they were defeated by the Mongols. Over the centuries they were fully assimilated into the Hungarian population. Rogerius, a monk who survived the Mongol invasion of Hungary, pointed out not only the genocidal element of the occupation, but also that the Mongols especially "found pleasure" in humiliating women.

Iberian Peninsula

Hadith Bayad wa Riyad (12th century) was an Arabic love story about an Andalusian female and a foreign Damascene male.

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 in 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 Iranian 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.

The offspring of marriages between Arabs and non-Arabs in Iberia (Berbers or local Iberians) 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. Some sources consider this term the origin for the Spanish word Mulatto. However, the Real Academia Española does not endorse such etymology. This is because the term was mainly used during the time period of al-Andalus to refer to local Iberians (Christians and pagans) who converted to Islam or whose ancestors had converted. An example is the Banu Qasi, a Muslim dynasty of Basque origin. In addition, many Muladi were also descended from Saqaliba (Slavic) slaves taken from Eastern Europe via the Arab slave trade. Collectively, Christian Europeans named all the Muslims of Iberia, "Moors", regardless of ethnic origin.

After the Reconquista, which was completed in 1492, most of the Moors were forced to either flee to Islamic territories or convert to Christianity. The ones who converted to Christianity were known as Moriscoes, and they were often persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition as suspects of heresy on the basis of the Limpieza de sangre ("Cleanliness of blood") doctrine, under which anti-miscegenation laws were implemented in the Iberian Peninsula.

Anyone whose ancestors had miscegenated with the Moors or Jews were suspected of secretly practicing Islam or Judaism, so were often particularly monitored 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 had not 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, a genetic study of the current population of the Iberian Peninsula, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, estimated that about 10% have North African ancestors and 20% have Sephardi Jews as ancestors. Since there is no direct link between genetic makeup and religious affiliation, however, it is difficult to draw direct conclusions between their findings and forced or voluntary conversion. Nevertheless, the Sephardic result is in contradiction or not replicated in all the body of genetic studies done in Iberia and has been later questioned by the authors themselves and by Stephen Oppenheimer who estimates that much earlier migrations, 5000 to 10,000 years ago from the Eastern Mediterranean might also have accounted for the Sephardic estimates: "They are really assuming that they are looking at his migration of Jewish immigrants, but the same lineages could have been introduced in the Neolithic". The rest of genetic studies done in Spain estimate the North African contribution ranging from 2.5/3.4% to 7.7%.

Italian Peninsula

"Othello and Desdemona", a painting by Alexandre-Marie Colin in 1829

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 when the Arab-Norman culture had flourished under the reign of Roger II of Sicily, later rulers forced the Moors to either convert to Christianity or be expelled from the kingdom.

In Malta, Arabs and 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.

At times, the Italian city-states also played an active role in the Arab slave trade, where Moorish and Italian traders occasionally exchanged slaves.

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.

An artistic depiction of Roxelana with Suleiman the Magnificent, by German painter Anton Hickel (1780).

Russia

See also: Afro-Russian

See also: Ethnic Chinese in Russia

The Metis Foundation estimates that there are about 40,000 mixed-race Russians.

Many Chinese men, even those who had left wives and children behind in China, married local women in the 1920s, especially those women who had been widowed during the wars and upheavals of the previous decade. Their mixed race children tended to be given Russian forenames; some retained their fathers' Chinese surnames, while others took on Russian surnames, and a large proportion also invented new surnames using their father's entire family name and given name as the new surname.

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, Northcaucasian 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 Ukrainian harem slave who later became Suleiman the Magnificent's favourite wife, and Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, wife of Abdul Hamid I and cousin 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 from that of the Turkic population in Central Asia. In addition to intermarriage, the large harems of Ottoman sultans often consisted almost entirely of female concubines who were of Christian European origin.

The degree of miscegenation is very high in the former Soviet Union. Interethnic marriages made up about 22% of all marriages in Moscow, according to the figures from 1995. The majority of such marriages occur among Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and other Slavic peoples. 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 Slavic males and Oriental (Asian) or Turkic, Northcaucasian, Southcaucasian and Finno-Ugric 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 Finno-Ugric, Turkic and Northcaucasian men (although much of this is due to the assumption of their faith as Muslim) and Jews, and quite high intolerance towards those who marry blacks or have children by 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

See also: British Mixed-Race

Seal with ex-wife Heidi Klum.

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 to the Romani as the Romanichal. In India, the British East India Company and other European soldiers intermarried with 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. The British East India Company brought many South Asian lascars to Britain, where many settled down with local white British wives, due to a lack of Asian women in Britain at the time.

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, although America has many fewer specific definitions of race (four racial definitions as opposed to the United Kingdom's 86). 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 or mixed-ethnicity family (families headed by one white-British parent and one white parent not of British origin are included in the figure) and two out of five Chinese women have partners of a different race. One out of five Chinese men have partners of a different race. 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.

Middle East

The Slave Market, painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, c. 1884

A Stanford team found the greatest diversity outside Africa among people living in the wide crescent of land stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean to northern India. Not only was the region among the first colonized by the African migrants, they theorize, but the large number of European and East Asian genes among the population indicates that it has long been a human highway, with large numbers of migrants from both directions conquering, trading and generally reproducing along its entire length. The same team also found out that the Bedouin nomads of the Middle East actually have some European and South Asian blood.

In ancient times a Celtic people known as Galatians settled in what is present day Turkey and thus interbred with the people there. During the empire of Alexander the Great, many Greek/Macedonian soldiers had inter-ethnic relationships with women throughout the Middle East all the way to northwestern India. Later, coastal North Africa and parts of the Middle East were part of the Roman Empire and many Roman men were posted as soldiers there. Many of them had inter-ethnic relationships with local Middle-Eastern women. The Germanic people known as the Vandals also conquered parts of coastal North Africa during the great migration period which led to opportunities of inter-ethnic relationships between Germanic men and local North African women.

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), South Asia (Hindus), the North Caucasus (mainly Circassians), Central Asia (mainly Turks), and Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Saqaliba). The Barbary pirates also captured 1,250,000 slaves from Western Europe and North America between the 16th and 19th centuries. It was also common for Arab conquerors, traders and explorers to marry local females in the lands they conquered or traded with, in various parts of Africa, Asia (see Asia section) and Europe (see Europe section).

Inter-ethnic relationships were generally accepted in Arabic society and formed a fairly common theme in medieval Arabic literature and Persian literature. For example, the Persian poet Nizami, who had himself married his Kipchak slave girl, wrote The Seven Beauties (1196). Its frame story involves a Persian prince marrying 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 One Thousand and One 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 One Thousand and One 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.

One study found that some Arabic-speaking populations—Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouins—have what appears to be substantial mtDNA gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa, amounting to 10–15% of lineages within the past three millennia. In the case of Yemenites, the average is higher at 35%. Of particular historic interest might be the finding that with almost no exceptions the sub-Saharan gene flow was exclusively female, at least in part as a result of the Arab slave trade.

Between the 11th and 13th centuries, medieval Western Asia was repeatedly invaded by Europeans (Crusades) and Mongols (Mongol Empire) which led to opportunities for inter-ethnic relationships between European, Mongol and Central Asian soldiers with local Arab women. As well as many Europeans, there were North Africans, South Asians and Central Asians who worked as mercenaries and traders in the area, most of them converting to Islam and taking local women as wives. From 839 AD, Viking Varangian mercenaries who were in the service of the Byzantine Empire—notably Harald Sigurdsson—campaigned in North Africa, Jerusalem and other places in the Middle East during the Byzantine-Arab Wars, and interbred with the local population as spoils of warfare or through eventual settling with many Scandinavian and Slavic Viking men taking Arab or Anatolian women as wives. There is archaeological evidence these Vikings had established contact with the city of Baghdad, at the time the center of the Islamic Empire, and connected with the populace there.

A genetic anthropological study known as The Genographic Project has found what is believed to be faint genetic traces left by medieval Crusaders in the Middle East. The team has uncovered a specific DNA signature in Lebanon that is probably linked to the 7th and 8th Christian crusades. It is believed the Crusaders were welcomed by Christian Arabs long suffering under Islamic rule and many offered their daughters in marriage to the European Crusaders who originated from European kingdoms mostly France, England and the Holy Roman Empire.

In the Ottoman Empire, in addition to the Ottoman elites often taking large numbers of European wives and concubines (see Southeastern and Eastern Europe section), there were also opportunities for the reverse, when the empire recruited young Christian boys (mostly Europeans in addition to Christian Arabs) to become the elite troop of the Turkish Empire, the Janissaries. These Janissaries were stationed throughout the Turkish empire including the Middle-East and North Africa leading to inter-ethnic relationships between European men and women from the Middle East and North Africa. Further inter-ethnic marriages took place during the European colonial age when Great Britain, France and Italy ruled various parts of this region. The majority of these marriages were between European men and local Arab and Berber women.

The concubines of the Ottoman Sultan consisted chiefly of purchased slaves. Because Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, the Sultan's concubines were generally of Christian origin. The mother of a Sultan, though technically a slave, received the extremely powerful title of Valide Sultan, and at times became effective ruler of the Empire (see Sultanate of women). One notable example was Kösem Sultan, daughter of a Greek Christian priest, who dominated the Ottoman Empire during the early decades of the 17th century. Another notable example was Roxelana, the favourite wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Inter-ethnic sexual slavery still continues today in a smaller form in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, where women and children are trafficked from the post-Soviet states, Eastern Europe, Far East, Africa, South Asia and other parts of the Middle East.

Israel

The modern State of Israel was established as a nation-state for the Jewish people. The Jewish identity contains elements of religion (Judaism), ethnicity, and a sense of a common lineage.

In this sense, Jewish miscegenation could be viewed on two levels; one based on belonging to the Jewish ethnic group or Jewish people, and the other based on the race of a given Jew. Jewish miscegenation based on Jewishness (belonging to the Jewish ethnic group or Jewish people) would be defined on whether one parent is not Jewish, independent of whether either the Jewish or non-Jewish parent are of the same or different races. Racial miscegenation would be defined as the union between a Jew of a given race with a person of a different race, be the other person a Jew or not. Two Jewish people may still be considered "interracial" if those two Jews are of different races, although it would not be considered exogamous in the context of Jewish ethnicity, as both are still Jews.

In Israel, all marriages must be approved by religious celebrants, while civil marriages are legally recognized if 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 in Israel by non-Orthodox Rabbis are not recognized.

The Rabbinate prohibits marriage in Israel of halakhic Jews (i.e. people born to a Jewish mother or Jewish by conversion), whether they are Orthodox Jews or not, to partners who are non-Jewish or who are of Jewish descent that runs through the paternal line (i.e. not Jewish according to halakha), unless they undergo a formal conversion to Judaism. As a result, in the state of Israel, people of differing religious traditions cannot legally marry someone in another religion and multi-faith couples must leave the country to get married.

The only other option in Israel for the marriage of a halakhic Jew (Orthodox or not) to a non-Jew, or for that matter, a Christian to a non-Christian or Muslim to a non-Muslim, is for one partner to formally convert to the other's religion, be it to Orthodox Judaism, a Christian denomination or a denomination of Islam. As for persons with patrilineal Jewish descent (i.e. not recognized as Jewish according to halakha) who wish to marry a halakhic Jew (i.e., born to a Jewish mother or is Jewish by Orthodox conversion) who is Orthodox or otherwise, is also required to formally convert to Orthodox Judaism or they cannot legally marry. According to a Haaretz article "Justice Ministry drafts civil marriage law for ‘refuseniks’" 300,000 people, or 150,000 couples, are affected by marriage restrictions based on the partners' disparate religious traditions or non-halakhic Jewish status.

Israeli law concerns itself with miscegenation based on Jewish ethnicity, 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.

Many Israeli Jews oppose mixed relationships between Jewish women and Arab men. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage is equivalent to "national treason". A group of 35 Jewish men, known as "Fire for Judaism", in Pisgat Ze'ev have started patrolling the town in an effort to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of Petah Tikva has also announced an initiative to prevent interracial relationships, providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to "inform" on Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of Kiryat Gat launched a school programme in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.

In February 2010 Maariv has reported that the Tel Aviv municipality has instituted an official, government-sponsored "counselling program" to discourage Jewish girls from dating and marrying Arab boys. The Times has also reported on a vigilante parents’ group policing the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze'ev to intimidate and discourage local Arab-Jewish couples. The Jewish anti-missionary group Yad L'achim has also performed paramilitary "rescue operations" of Jewish women from non-Jewish husbands and celebrates the "rescued women" on their website.

United Arab Emirates

There are tens of thousands of women from eastern Europe and Asia working as prostitutes in Dubai. Men from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates form a large proportion of the customers.

Oceania

German immigrant Hermann A. Widemann had a large family with his Hawaiian wife Mary Kaumana, 1886

Australia

Most of the early Chinese-Australia population consisted of Cantonese migrants from Guangzhou and Taishan, including some from Fujian, who came during the gold rush period of the 1850s. Marriage records show that between the 1850s and the start of the 20th century, there were about 2000 legal marriages between white women and Chinese men in Australia’s eastern colonies, probably with similar numbers involved in de facto relationships of various kinds (e.g., cohabitation, sexual intimacy, etc.). The number of such marriages declined, as stories of viciousness and the seduction of white women grew, mixed with opposition to intermarriage. Rallies against Chinese men marrying white women became widespread, with many Australian men reviewing Chinese men marrying and cohabiting with white women as an threat to the white race. In late 1878 there were 181 marriages between European women and Chinese men, and 171 couples cohabiting without matrimony, resulting in 586 Eurasian children. Such numbers of intermarriage continued until the 1880s and the 1930s.

Analysis of the 2006 census reveals that 52% of Aboriginal men and 55% of Aboriginal women were married to non-Aboriginal Australians.

New Zealand

Miscegenation is a politically charged topic in New Zealand, although mixed marriages are very common and almost universally accepted. People who identify as Māori typically have ancestors ('tīpuna') from at least two distinct ethnicities. Historically this has leant itself to the majority belief that "real" Māori were gradually disappearing from New Zealand and "one people" were forming. This view held sway in New Zealand until the late 1960s and 70s, when a revival and re-establishment of Māori culture and tradition coincided with a rejection of the majority opinion.

The belief that Māori were disappearing was partially founded on the reality of high and ongoing rates of intermarriage between Europeans and Māori before and since colonisation. During the revival of Māori culture and tradition this belief began to be challenged by redefining "Māori" as an ethnic identity as opposed to a racial category. As a result a person may have one European/Asian/Pacific parent and one Māori parent, but be considered no less "authentically Māori" than a descendent of two Māori.

Two-thirds of Māori births, half of Pacific births, and a third of white and Asian births belonged to more than one ethnic group.

Portuguese colonies

See also: Orfas del Rei

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, Mozambique, 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.

Demographics of ethnoracial admixture

U.S.

According to the U.S. Census, in 2000 there were 504,119 Asian-white marriages, 287,576 black-white marriages, and 31,271 Asian-black marriages. The black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 558,000 in 2010, according to Census Bureau figures.

New Jersey, 2008

In the United States, rates of interracial cohabitation are significantly higher than those of marriage. Although only 7% of married African American men have Caucasian American wives, 13% of cohabitating African American men have Caucasian American partners. 25% of married Asian American women have Caucasian spouses, but 45% of cohabitating Asian American women are with Caucasian American men. Of cohabiting Asian men, slightly over 37% of Asian men have white female partners over 10% married White American women. Asian American women and Asian American men who live with a white partner, 40 and 27 percent, respectively (Le, 2006b).In 2008, of new marriages including an Asian man, 80% were to an Asian spouse and 14% to a White spouse; of new marriages involving an Asian woman, 61% were to an Asian spouse and 31% to a White spouse. > Almost 30% of Asians and Latinos outmarry, with 86.8 and 90% of these, respectively, being to a white person. According to Karyn Langhorne Folan, "...although the most recent census available reported that 70% of African American women are single, African American women have the greatest resistance to marrying 'out' of the race."

One study on college students noted that, while 90% of the 80 black men reported experiences in interracial dating, only 12% of the 140 white men reported such experiences. The massive sexual survey revealed that 19% of black males had engaged in sexual activity with white women. A Gallup poll on interracial dating in June 2006 found 75% of Americans approving of a white man dating a black woman, and 71% approving of a black man dating a white woman. Among people between the ages of 18 and 29, the poll found that 95% approved of blacks and whites dating, and about 60% said they had dated someone of a different race. 69% of Hispanics, 52% of blacks, and 45% of whites said they have dated someone of another race or ethnic group. In 1980, just 17% of all respondents said they had dated someone from a different racial background.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous is the son of a white father and a black mother

However, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley, using data from over 1 million profiles of singles from online dating websites, whites were far more reluctant to date outside their race than non-whites. The study found that over 80% of whites, including whites who stated no racial preference, contacted other whites, whereas about 3% of whites contacted blacks, a result that held for younger and older participants. Only 5% of whites responded to inquiries from blacks. Black participants were ten times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks, however black participants sent inquiries to other blacks more often than otherwise.

Interracial marriage is still relatively uncommon, especially among whites. In 2010, 15% of new marriages were interracial, and of those only 9% of Whites married outside of their race. Of the 275,000 new interracial marriages in 2010, 43% were white-Hispanic, 14.4% were white-Asian, 11.9% were white-black and the rest were other combinations. Black-white marriages are the least common interracial coupling. However, interracial marriage has become more common over the past decades due to increasing racial diversity, and liberalizing attitudes toward the practice. According to the 2010 Census, the number of interracial marriages in the U.S. is up 20% since 2000, to around 4.5 million. "A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another. ... Rates more than doubled among whites and nearly tripled among blacks between 1980 and 2008. But for both Hispanics and Asians, rates were nearly identical in 2008 and 1980.", according to a Pew Research Center analysis of demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

According to studies by Jenifer L. Bratter and Rosalind B. King made publicly available on the Education Resources Information Center, White female-Black male and White female-Asian male marriages are more prone to divorce than White-White pairings. Conversely, unions between White males and non-White females (and between Hispanics and non-Hispanic persons) have similar or lower risks of divorce than White-White marriages, unions between white male-black female last longer than white-white pairings or white-Asian pairings.

Brazil

See also: Race in 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, East Asian (mostly Japanese) and Amerindian ancestry.

Interracial marriages comprised 22.6% of all marriages in 2000. 15.7% of blacks, 24.4% of whites and 27.6% of Pardos (mixed-race/brown) married someone whose race was different from their own.

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. The Tasmanian aboriginals were one of the most isolated groups 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 species.

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

See also: Genetic history of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Multiracial American

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

Some claim 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 phenomenon. Thus, the percentage of African admixture amongst white Americans can be relatively high without any significant change in skin tone.

Within the African-Americans population, the amount of African admixture is directly correlated with darker skin since less selective pressure against dark skin is applied within the group of "non-passing" individuals. Thus, African-Americans may have a much wider range of African admixture (>0–100%), whereas European-Americans have a lower range (2–20%).

A small overlap exists such that it is possible that someone who identifies himself as white may have more African admixture than a person who identifies himself as black.

The Trapper's Bride shows a trapper, Francois, paying $600 in trade goods for an Indian woman to be his wife, ca. 1837

A statistical analysis done in 1958 using historical census data and historical data on immigration and birth rates concluded that 21% 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:

The data presented in this study indicate that the popular belief in the non-African background of white persons is invalid. Over twenty-eight million white persons are descendants of persons of African origin. Furthermore, the majority of the persons with African ancestry are classified as white.

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 the CIA lists Argentina's native population at 0.9%, Brazil's at 0.4%, and Uruguay's at 0%. However, the range varies widely from country to country in Latin America with some countries having significantly larger Amerindian minorities. According to official statistics —as reported by the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples or CDI— Amerindians make up 10-14% of the population of Mexico.

Depiction of casta system in Mexico, 18th century

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 (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 20th century did large numbers of Europeans begin to migrate to South America and consequently altering its demographics.

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.

Demographics of Brazil in 1835, 1940, 2000 and 2008
Year	White	Brown	Black
1835	24.4%	18.2%	51.4%
1940	64%	21%	14%
2000	53.7%	38.5%	6.2%
2008	48.8%	43.8%	6.5%

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

A Spaniard plays with his mixed-race daughter while his Mulatto wife looks on, 1763

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

Frank Moya Pons, a Dominican historian documented that Spanish colonists intermarried with Taíno women, and, over time, these mestizo descendants intermarried with Africans, creating a tri-racial Creole culture. 1514 census records reveal that 40% of Spanish men in the colony of Santo Domingo had Taíno wives. A recent study conducted in Puerto Rico suggests that over 61% of the population possess Amerindian mtDNA.

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 9th 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 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 Romani males 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 Romani 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 Romanis 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 Romani 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

• A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century
• Amalgamation (race)
• Anti-miscegenation laws
• Discrimination based on skin color
• Ethnic pornography
• Exogamy
• Interracial marriage
• Interracial romance in film
• Melungeon
• Mestizo

• Mixed Race Day
• Multiculturalism
• Multiracial
• Passing (racial identity)
• Plaçage
• Race and genetics
• Race and society
• Race of the future
• Racial Integrity Act of 1924
• Racism

Bibliography

• Christina Miu Bing Cheng (1999). Macau: a cultural Janus. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 962-209-486-4.
• João de Pina-Cabral (2002). Between China and Europe: person, culture and emotion in Macao. Vol. Volume 74 of London School of Economics monographs on social anthropology. Berg. ISBN 0-8264-5749-5. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
• Leupp, Gary P. (2003). Interracial Intimacy in Japan. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-6074-7.

Other sources

• Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, John. (23 October 2000). The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics. Xlibris Corporation. p. 268. ISBN 0-7388-3089-5. See esp. "Chapter Seven: Laws Against Mixing Races"
• Croly, David Goodman (1864). Miscegenation, The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & Co. ISBN 0-7388-3089-5.
• Deschamps, Bénédicte, Le racisme anti-italien aux États-Unis (1880–1940), in Exclure au nom de la race (États-Unis, Irlande, Grande-Bretagne), Michel Prum (Éd.). Paris: Syllepse, 2000. 59–81.
• Hodes, Martha, ed. "Miscegenation" (1998). Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History. New York, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-67173-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a different color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Lemire, Elise (2002). "Miscegenation": Making Race in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-3664-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Novkov, Julie, Racial union: law, intimacy, and the White state in Alabama, 1865–1954, University of Michigan Press, 2008, pp. 125–128.
• Pascoe, Peggy (19 April 2004). "Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation". George Mason University's History News Network. Retrieved 14 July 2008.
• Rosenthal, Debra J. (2004). Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S and Spanish-American Fiction. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-5564-2.
• Werner Sollors, ed. (19 October 2000). Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Sollors, Werner ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512856-7.
• Tehranian, John, Whitewashed: America's invisible Middle Eastern minority, New York University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8147-8306-1
• Ubeysekara, Ruwan Nisantha, Questioning the Revival: White Ethnicities in the Racial Pentagon, PhD Thesis, University of Bath, 2008.

External links

• Explore Famous Interracial Couples and Other Race Relations Issues on the About.com Website.
• Perez v. Sharp
• Historical Background on Miscegenation
• Ernest Ingersoll (1920). "Cross-Fertilization in Animals and in Man" . Encyclopedia Americana.