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The term multiracial people refers to people who are mixed with two or more races and the term multi-ethnic people refers to people who are of more than one ethnicity. A variety of terms have been used both historically and presently for multiracial people in a variety of contexts, including multiethnic, polyethnic, occasionally bi-ethnic, biracial, mixed-race, Métis, Muwallad, Melezi, Coloureds, Dougla people, half-caste, Euronesian, mulatto, mestizo, , Melungeon, quadroon, Quadroon, griffe, sacatra, zambo, Indo people, hapa, hāfu, Garifuna, pardo, and Gurans. A number of these once-acceptable terms are now considered offensive, in addition to those that were initially coined for pejorative use.
Individuals of multiracial backgrounds make up a significant portion of the population in many parts of the world. In North America, studies have found that the multiracial population is continuing to grow. In many countries of Latin America, make up the majority of the population and in some others also . In the Caribbean, multiracial people officially make up the majority of the population in the Dominican Republic (73%), Aruba (68%), and Cuba (51%).
According to American sociologist Troy Duster and ethicist Pilar Ossorio:
In the United States:
Terms such as mulatto for people of partially African descent and mestizo for people of partially Native American descent are still used by English-speaking people of the Western Hemisphere but mostly to refer to the past or to the demography of Latin America and its diasporic population. Half-breed is a historic term for people of partial Native American ancestry; it is now considered pejorative and discouraged from use. Mestee, once widely used, is now used mostly for members of historically mixed-race groups, such as Louisiana Creoles, , Redbones, Brass Ankles and Mayles.
In South Africa and much of English-speaking southern Africa, the term Coloured was used to describe both mixed-race persons of African and European descent, and those Asians not of African descent.
In Latin America, populations became triracial after the introduction of African slavery. A panoply of terms developed during the Spanish and Portuguese colonial periods, including terms such as zambo for persons of Native American and native African descent. Charts and diagrams intended to explain the classifications were common. The well-known Casta paintings in Mexico and, to some extent, Peru, were illustrations of the different classifications.
At one time, Latin American census categories have used such classifications. In Brazilian censuses since the Imperial times, for example, most persons of mixed heritage, except with some European descent (or any other to the extent it is not clearly perceptible) and vice versa, tend to be thrown into the single category of "pardo". But racial boundaries in Brazil are related less to ancestry than to phenotype. A westernized Amerindian with copper-colored skin may also be classified as a "pardo", a caboclo in this case, despite not being mixed race. A European-looking person, even with one or more native African or Indigenous ancestors, is not classified as "pardo" but as "branco", a white Brazilian. The same applies to "negros", whose European or Native American ancestors are not visible in their appearance. According to genetic research, most Brazilians of all racial groups (except Asian-Brazilians and natives) are, to some extent, mixed-race.
In the English language, the terms miscegenation and amalgamation were used for unions between whites, blacks, and other ethnic groups. The term 'miscegenation' initially replaced 'amalgamation' due to the latter's association with slavery in the 1800s, while 'miscegenation' is today often considered offensive and controversial. The terms mixed-race, biracial or multiracial are becoming generally accepted. In other languages, terms for miscegenation are not necessarily considered offensive.
For centuries, Arab slave traders sold sub-Saharan Africans as slaves in cumulatively large numbers throughout the Persian Gulf, Anatolia, Central Asia and the Arab world. Communities descended from these slaves and local peoples can be found throughout these regions.Gwyn Campbell, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, 1 edition, (Routledge: 2003), p.ix Barbary pirates were known to attack European and British ships and take Europeans into slavery as well. So many were taken, that the memoirs of survivors are considered a literary genre known as captivity narratives. When English and other European colonists were taken captive by Native Americans, they had models for recounting their trials.
Cape Verde, in west Africa, has one of the most mixed-race populations (around 75% of the population) on the planet.
Mixed-race South Africans are commonly referred to as . According to the 2016 South African Census, they are the second-largest ethnic group (8.8%), behind Native Africans, or Native African Bantu peoples, who constitute (80.8%) of the current population. European South Africans make up 8.1%.
Virtually all Malagasy people are of some degree of mixed descent; however, the amount of mixture varies greatly between regions of Madagascar, despite all Malagasy people sharing a common language and similar cultural elements. The Malagasy of the central highlands of Madagascar have predominantly Austronesian ancestry, the Malagasy of the west coast and the south of the island have predominantly Bantu ancestry, and Malagasy of the island's east coast are of roughly equal degrees Bantu and Austronesian ancestry. The average Malagasy person's genetic makeup includes a roughly equal blend of Southeast Asian and East African genes.
Article 366(2) of the Indian Constitution defines Anglo-Indian as:
(2) an Anglo-Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only;
After the defeat of Spain during the Spanish–American War in 1898, the Philippines and other remaining Spanish colonies were ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris. The Philippines was under U.S. sovereignty until 1946, though occupied by Japan during World War II. In 1946, in the Treaty of Manila, the U.S. recognized the Republic of the Philippines as an independent nation. Even after 1946, the U.S. maintained a strong military presence in the Philippines, with as many as 21 U.S. military bases and 100,000 U.S. military personnel stationed there as defense in Asia and during the Vietnam War.
After the bases closed in 1992, American troops left, often abandoning partners and their Amerasian children. The Pearl S. Buck International foundation estimates there are 52,000 Amerasians in the Philippines, with 5,000 in the Clark area of Angeles City. An academic research paper presented in the U.S. (in 2012) by an Angeles, Pampanga, Philippines Amerasian college research study unit suggests that the number could be a lot more, possibly reaching 250,000. This is also partially due to the fact that almost all Amerasians intermarried with other Amerasians and Filipino natives.Mixed Marriage...Interreligious, Interracial, Interethnic By Dr. Robert H. Schram The newer Amerasians from the United States would add to the already older settlement of peoples from other countries in the Americas that happened when the Philippines was under Spanish rule,Stephanie Mawson, 'Between Loyalty and Disobedience: The Limits of Spanish Domination in the Seventeenth Century Pacific' (Univ. of Sydney M.Phil. thesis, 2014), appendix 3. as the Philippines once received immigrants from Spanish occupied Panama, Peru, and Mexico.
In the United States, intermarriage between Filipinos and other ethnicities is common. They have the highest number of interracial marriages among Asian immigrant groups, as documented in California. Some 21.8% of Philippine-Americans are of mixed ancestry.
In Singapore and Malaysia, the majority of inter-ethnic marriages are between Overseas Chinese and Indians. The offspring of such marriages are informally known as "Chindian". The Malaysian government classifies them only 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 "Malaysian Indian" by the 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 Buddhism and Taoism. But Indian Muslims and Arab Singaporean and Malaysia often take local Malay wives, because of their common faith.
The Chitty people, in Singapore and the Malacca state of Malaysia, are Tamils with considerable Malay ancestry. The early Tamil settlers took local wives, as they had not brought their own women at that time.
In the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, intermarriage has been common between Overseas Chinese and native tribespeople, such as the Murut people and Dusun people in Sabah, and the Iban people and Bisaya in Sarawak. A mixture of cultures has resulted in both states. The offspring of these marriages are called "Sino-(name of tribe)", e.g. Sino-Dusun. Normally, children are strongly affected by the father's ethnicity and culture, being raised in his culture. These Sino-natives usually become fluent in both Malay language and English language. A smaller number are able to speak Chinese dialects and Standard Chinese, especially those who have received education in vernacular Chinese schools.
The Burgher People are a Eurasian ethnic group. They are descendants through paternal lines of European colonists from the 16th to 20th centuries (mostly Portuguese, Dutch, German and British) and with maternal ancestry among local women. Other European minorities in such admixtures include Swedish, Norwegian, French and Irish.
The Sri Lanka Kaffirs are an ethnic group partially descended from 16th-century Portuguese traders and their enslaved Africans. The Kaffirs spoke a distinctive creole based on Portuguese, the Sri Lanka Kaffir language, which is now extinct. Their cultural heritage includes the dance styles Kaffringna and Manja, as well as the Portuguese Sinhalese, Creole, Afro-Sinhalese varieties.
In 2000, The Sunday Times reported that "Britain has the highest rate of interracial relationships in the world" and certainly the UK has the highest rate in the European Union. The 2001 census showed the population of England to be 1.4% mixed-race, compared with 2.7% in Canada and 1.4% in the U.S. (estimate from 2002), although this U.S. figure did not include mixed-race people who had a parent with African Ancestry. Both the US and UK have fewer people identifying as mixed race, however, than Canada.
In the United Kingdom, many mixed-race people have Caribbean, African or British Asian heritage. For example, supermodel Naomi Campbell has Jamaicans, African and roots. Some, like seven time Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton, are referred to or describe themselves as 'mixed'.
The 2001 UK Census included a section entitled 'Mixed', to which 1.4% (1.6% by 2005 estimates) of people responded, which was split further into White and Black Caribbean, White and Asian, White and Native African and Other Mixed. In the 2011 census, 2.2% chose 'Mixed' for the question on ethnicity.
During the time of slavery in the United States, a very large but unknown number of African slaves escaped to Canada, where slavery was made illegal in 1834, via the Underground Railroad. Many of these people married in with European Canadian and Native Canadian populations, although their precise numbers and the numbers of their descendants are not known.
Another 1.2% of Canadians officially are Métis (descendants of a historical population who were partially Aboriginal—also called "Indian" or "Native"—and European, particularly English people, Scottish people, Irish people and French people ethnic groups). Although the term "Métis" stems from the Latin verb miscēre, "to mix", the Métis people are a distinct ethnic group within Canada.
Mixed-race Americans officially numbered 6.1 million in 2006, or 2.0% of the population. There is considerable evidence that an accurate number would be much higher. Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their mixed-race heritage. The development of binary thinking about race meant that African Americans, a high proportion of whom have also had European ancestry, were classified as black. Some are now reclaiming additional ancestries. Many Americans today are multi-racial without knowing it. According to the Census Bureau, as of 2002, 75% of all had mixed ancestries, usually European and Native American.
In 2010, the number of Americans who checked both "black" and "white" on their census forms was 134 percent higher than it had been a decade earlier. In 2012, those choosing 'Two or more races' on the census was 2.4% of the total.
According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, by some calculations in the 2000 Census, the mixed-race population that is part white is as follows:
The stigma of a mixed-race heritage, associated with racial discrimination among numerous racial groups, has decreased significantly in the United States. People of mixed-race heritage can identify themselves now in the U.S. Census by any combination of races, whereas before Americans were required to select from only one category. For example, in 2010, they were offered choices of one or more racial categories from the following list:
The US has a growing mixed-race identity movement, reflective of a desire by people to claim their full identities. Interracial marriage, most notably between whites and blacks, was historically deemed immoral and illegal in most states in the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century because of its long association of blacks with the slave caste. California and the Western United States had similar laws to prohibit European-Asian marriages, which was associated with discrimination against Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast. Many states eventually repealed such laws and a 1967 decision by the US Supreme Court ( Loving v. Virginia) overturned all remaining US anti-miscegenation laws.
The United States is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world. Americans are mostly mixed ethnic descendants of various immigrant nationalities culturally distinct in their former countries. Assimilation and integration took place, unevenly at different periods of history, depending on the American region. The "Americanization" of foreign ethnic groups and the inter-racial diversity of millions of Americans has been a fundamental part of its history, especially on frontiers where different groups of people came together.
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as America's first mixed-race president, as he is the son of a European American mother of mostly English people descent and a Luo father from Kenya. He acknowledges both parents. His official White House biography describes him as African American. In Hawai'i, the U.S. state in which he was born, he would be called "hapa", which is the Hawaiian word for "mixed race".
The Indo-Fijian population is also a hodge-podge of South Asian immigrants (called Girmits in Fiji), who came as indentured labourers beginning in 1879. While a few of these labourers managed to bring wives, many of them either took or were given wives once they arrived in Fiji. The Girmits, who are classified as simply "Indians" to this day, came from many parts of the Indian subcontinent of present-day India, Pakistan and to a lesser degree Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is easy to recognize the Indian mixtures present in Fiji and see obvious traces of Southern and Northern Indians and other groups who have been categorised together. More of this phenomenon would have likely happened if the religious groups represented (primarily Hindu, Muslim and Sikh) had not resisted to some degree marriage between religious groups, which tended to be from more similar parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Over the years, particularly in the sugar cane-growing regions of Western Viti Levu and parts of Vanua Levu, Indo-Fijians and Indigenous Fijians have mixed. Others have Chinese/Fijian ancestry, Indo-Fijian/ or Rotuman ancestry and European/Fijian ancestry (often called "part Fijians"). The latter are often descendants of shipwrecked sailors and settlers who came during the colonial period. Migration from a dozen or more different Pacific countries (Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa and Wallis and Futuna being the most prevalent) have added to the various ethnicities and intermarriages.
"Mestizo" is the common word for mixed-race people in Latin America, especially people with Native American and Spaniards or other European ancestry. Mestizos make up a large portion of Latin Americans, comprising a majority in many countries.
In Latin America, racial mixture was officially acknowledged from colonial times. There was official nomenclature for every conceivable mixture present in the various countries. Initially, this classification was used as a type of caste system, where rights and privileges were accorded depending on one's official racial classification. Official caste distinctions were abolished in many countries of the Spanish language-speaking Americas as they became independent of Spain. Several terms have remained in common usage.
Race and racial mixture have played a significant role in the politics of many Latin American countries. In most countries, for example Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Panama, a majority of the population can be described as biracial or mixed race (depending on the country). In Mexico, over 80% of the population is mestizo in some degree or another.
The Mexican philosopher and educator José Vasconcelos authored an essay on the subject, "La Raza Cósmica", celebrating racial mixture. ex-president Hugo Chávez, of Spanish, indigenous and African ancestry, made positive references to the mixed-race ancestry of most Latin Americans from time to time.
Most Brazilians of mixed race are usually tri-racial, with Amerindian, European, and African origins. Other common mixed-race groups are between White Brazilians and Afro-Brazilians ( mulatto) and Amerindian and European ( caboclo or mameluco). But there are also African and Amerindian ( cafuzo) and Asian Brazilians (mostly Japanese) and European/other ( ainoko or more recently, hāfu). These groups are found throughout the country to varying degrees.
Since mixed-race relations in Brazilian society have occurred for many generations, some people find it difficult to trace their own ethnic ancestry. Today a majority of mixed-race Brazilians do not really know their ethnic ancestry, but they are aware that their ancestors were probably Portuguese, African and Amerindian. Additionally, a very large number of Italians (Brazil has the largest Italian population outside Italy), Japanese (the largest Japanese population outside Japan), Lebanese (the largest Lebanese population outside Lebanon), Germans, Poles, Russians and others contributed to Brazil's racial makeup. A high percentage of Brazilians is also of Jewish descent, perhaps hundreds of thousands, mostly found in the northeast of the country who cannot be sure of their ancestry as they descend from the so-called "Crypto-Jews" (Jews who practiced Judaism in secret but outwardly pretended to be Catholics), also called Marranos or New Christians, often considered Portuguese. According to some sources, one third of families arrived from Portugal during colonization were of Jewish origin.
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