The mixing of races, especially the marriage or cohabitation between a white person and a member of another race. Miscegenation has been susceptible to changing meanings insofar as racial categories have altered over time (see race and ethnicity). By the early twentieth century, as racial difference came to revolve around categories of white, black and Asian, and American Indian, notions of miscegenation balanced culturally constructed temptations. Certainly until the Civil Rights movement, black and white liaisons remained illegal and disturbing for many Americans, closely connected to the institution of lynching. In the aftermath of civil rights and changing immigration quotas in 1965, a revaluation of notions of color and race has occurred, with the result that miscegenation no longer carries the same weight as it once did.