page_title: Miscegenation
section_title: Oceania
hierarchical_section_title: Miscegenation / History of ethnoracial admixture and attitudes towards miscegenation / Oceania
caption_attribution_description: English: Hon. Hermann A. Widemann &amp; Family, May 1886.
context_page_description: Miscegenation is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be of different racial types. This racial mixing requires sexual activity between members of different races, thus producing mixed-race offspring. Opposition to miscegenation, thereby preserving their race's purity and nature, is a typical theme of racial supremacist movements.
  Though the notion that racial mixing is undesirable has arisen at different points in history, it gained particular prominence in Europe during the era of colonialism. Anonymous authors invented the word in an 1863 fraudulent political pamphlet, indicating that miscegenation meant interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations, particularly between "... the American White Man and Negro". The term came to be associated with laws which banned interracial marriage and sex, these laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws.
  Although the term "miscegenation" was formed from the Latin miscere "to mix" plus genus "race" or "kind", and it could therefore be perceived as value-neutral, it is almost always a pejorative term used by people who believe in white racial superiority and purity.
caption: German immigrant Hermann A. Widemann had a large family with his Hawaiian wife Mary Kaumana, 1886
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