As is commonly known, one of the most delicate question is how to refer to people of mixed race, which can be a matter of condemnation.
Some words may have fueled the problem and I never would have thought that the word miscegenation were one of these.
In fact, as Merriam-Webster reads, miscegenation especially refers to a "marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race."
However, racial issues aside, I'm wondering whether there is a "parallel" word which is especially used to to refer to a "marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a black person and a member of another race;" a word which is not perceived as offensive from a black person.
Can anyone explain?
Best Answer
Miscegenation was coined in the US precisely to condemn such relations. Its historical context was in arguments in defense of slavery: The possibility of mixed-race marriages or sexual relations being projected as an outcome so horrible that it was good that slavery was preventing it (of course slavery led to a lot of mixed-race children too, but that was not talked about) - and anti-miscegenation laws banning marriages and sexual relations between different races that existed in the US until 1967 when the federal Supreme Court ruled the last such laws to be unconstitutional.
The reason miscegenation was taken as applying particularly to the marriage, sexual relations or offspring of white people and people of other races, is that this was seen as a problem to the white racists that coined the word. Indeed while some laws did in fact specifically ban black people from marrying people of any other race (as the race deemed lowest in the racist hierarchy such people believed in) and some blocked people of non-white races from marrying each other, the overall focus was on "protecting the white race" from the perspective of white racists.
There is no parallel word because there wasn't a powerful group of black people who spoke English as their primray language, feared inter-racial marriages and spent centuries enacting and enforcing laws to prevent it, to coin such a word.