Octoroon

Historically in the context of slave societies of the Americas, a quadroon or quarteron was a mixed-race person with one quarter African and three quarters European ancestry (or in the context of Australia, one quarter aboriginal ancestry).

Similar classifications were octoroon for one eighth black and hexadecaroon for one sixteenth black.

Governments incorporated the terms in law defining rights and restrictions. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which is perceived by the dominant group as being subordinate. The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African ancestors or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry.

The word quadroon was borrowed from the French quarteron, and Spanish cuarterón, which have their roots in the Latin quartus, meaning a fourth. The word octoroon is rooted in the Latin octo-, meaning eight.

Quadroon was used to designate a person of one-quarter African/Aboriginal ancestry, that is one biracial parent (African/Aboriginal and Caucasian) and one White or European parent; in other words, one African/Aboriginal grandparent and three White or European grandparents. In Latin America, which had a variety of terms for racial groups, some terms for quadroons were morisco or chino.

In Latin America, the terms griffe or sambo were sometimes used for an individual of three-quarters African heritage, or the child of a biracial parent and a fully black parent.

The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one pure black parent and one pure white parent, or a person whose parents are both Mulatto. In some cases, it became a general term to refer to all persons of mixed race.

The term octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth African/Aboriginal ancestry; that is, someone with family heritage of one biracial grandparent; in other words, one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents. As with the use of quadroon, this word was applied to a limited extent in Australia for those of one-eighth Aboriginal ancestry, as the government implemented assimilation policies.

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