Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
Miscegenation is marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms miscere and genus. The word first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, an anti-abolitionist pamphlet David Goodman Croly and others published anonymously in advance of the 1864 presidential election in the United States. The term came to be associated with laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, which were known as anti-miscegenation laws. These laws were overruled federally in 1967, and by the year 2000, all states including Alabama had removed them from their laws. In the 21st century, newer scientific data shows that human populations are actually genetically quite similar. Studies show that races are more of an arbitrary social construct, and do not actually have a major genetic delineation.
Mestizo is a person of mixed European and Indigenous non-European ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors are Indigenous. The term was used as an ethno-racial exonym for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification. With the Bourbon reforms and the independence of the Americas, the caste system disappeared and terms like "mestizo" fell in popularity.
White is a racial classification of people generally used for those of mostly European ancestry. It is also a skin color specifier, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, ethnicity and point of view.
Mulatto is a racial classification that refers to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered by Nicholas Patrick Beck to be outdated and offensive in some countries and languages, such as English with the exceptions of some Anglophone Caribbean or West Indian countries and Dutch, but it does not have the same associations in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. Among Latin Americans in the US, for instance, the term can be a source of pride. A mulatta is a female mulatto.
The terms multiracial people or mixed-race people refer to people who are of more than one race, and the terms multi-ethnic people or ethnically mixed people refer to people who are of more than one ethnicity. A variety of terms have been used both historically and presently for mixed-race people in a variety of contexts, including multiethnic, polyethnic, occasionally bi-ethnic, Métis, Muwallad, Melezi, Coloured, Dougla, half-caste, ʻafakasi, mestizo, mutt, Melungeon, quadroon, octoroon, sambo/zambo, Eurasian, 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.
In the colonial societies of the Americas and Australia, a quadroon or quarteron was a person with one-quarter African/Aboriginal and three-quarters European ancestry. Similar classifications were octoroon for one-eighth black and quintroon for one-sixteenth black.
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Casta is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the term also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards, indigenous people, and Africans. Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African. A plethora of terms were used for people with mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
In societies that regard some races or ethnic groups of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent refers to the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population. At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States census recognized five racial categories, as well as people who belong to two or more of the racial categories. The United States also recognizes the broader notion of ethnicity. The 2000 census and 2010 American Community Survey inquired about the "ancestry" of residents, while the 2020 census allowed people to enter their "origins". The Census Bureau also classified respondents as either Hispanic or Latino, identifying as an ethnicity, which comprises the minority group in the nation.
Multiracialism is a conceptual framework used to theorize and interpret identity formation in global multiracial populations. Multiracialism explores the tendency for multiracial individuals to identify with a third category of 'mixed-ness' as opposed to being a fully accepted member of multiple, or any, racial group(s). As an analytical tool, multiracialism strives to emphasize that societies are increasingly composed of multiracial individuals, warranting a broader recognition of those who do not fit into a society's clear-cut notions of race. Additionally, multiracialism also focuses on what identity formation means in the context of oppressive histories and cultural erasure.
White Latin Americans or European Latin Americans are Latin Americans of European descent.
White Hispanic and Latino Americans, also called Euro-Hispanics, Euro-Latinos, White Hispanics, or White Latinos, are Americans of white ancestry and ancestry from Latin America. It also refers to people of European ancestry from Latin America that speak Spanish natively and immigrated to the United States.
The legal and social strictures that define White Americans, and distinguish them from persons who are not considered White by the government and society, have varied throughout the history of the United States. Race is defined as a social and political category within society based on hierarchy.
Brazilian society is made up of a confluence of people of Indigenous, Portuguese, and African descent. Other major significant groups include Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Lebanese, and Japanese.
Multiracial Americans or mixed-race Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed-race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially. In the 2020 United States census, 33.8 million individuals or 10.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial. There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
In the United States, many U.S. states historically had anti-miscegenation laws which prohibited interracial marriage and, in some states, interracial sexual relations. Some of these laws predated the establishment of the United States, and some dated to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Racial fluidity is the idea that race is not permanent and fixed, but rather imprecise and variable. The interpretation of someone's race, including their self-identification and identification by others, can change over the course of a lifetime, including in response to social situations. The racial identity of groups can change over time as well.
