In the colonial societies of the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America, North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. ...

and

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...

, 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 (Latin root ''octo-'', means "eight") and quintroon for one-sixteenth black. Governments of the time sometimes 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 the dominant group perceives as being subordinate. The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African

ancestors An ancestor, also known as a forefather, fore-elder or a forebear, is a parent or ( recursively) the parent of an antecedent (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent and so forth). ''Ancestor'' is "any person from w ...

or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry.

Etymology

The word ''quadroon'' was borrowed from the French ''quarteron'' and the Spanish ''cuarterón'', both of which have their root in the Latin ''quartus'', meaning "a quarter". Similarly, the Spanish

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...

''cuarterón'' is used to describe ''cuarterón de mulato'' or ''morisco'' (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter black) and ''cuarterón de mestizo'' or ''

castizo ''Castizo''Pronunciation in Latin American Spanish: is a racial category used in 18th-century Colonial Mexico to refer to people who were three-quarters Spanish by descent and one-quarter Amerindian. The feminine form of the word is ''castiza''. ...

'', (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter

Amerindian The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the A ...

), especially in Caribbean South America. Castas 05morisca max

Racial classifications

Quadroon was used to designate a person of one-quarter African/ Aboriginal ancestry, that is equivalent to one

biracial Mixed race people are people of more than one race or 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-ethn ...

parent (African/Aboriginal and Caucasian) and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of 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'', see ''

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 it also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical f ...

''. ''Terceroon'' was a term synonymous with quadroon, derived from being three generations of descent from an African ancestor, counting the ancestor as the first generation. The term ''

mulatto (, ) is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese ...

'' was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one fully black parent and one fully white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto.Carter G. Woodson and Charles H. Wesley, ''The Story of the Negro Retold'', (Wildside Press, LLC, 2008), p. 44: "The mulatto was the offspring of a white and a black person; the sambo of a mulatto and a black. From the mulatto and a white came the quadroon and from the quadroon and a white the mustee. The child of a mustee and a white person was called the mustefino." In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries. The term octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth African/Aboriginal ancestry; that is, someone with family heritage equivalent to one biracial grandparent; in other words, one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents. An example was Russian poet

Alexander Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (; rus, links=no, Александр Сергеевич ПушкинIn pre-Revolutionary script, his name was written ., r=Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn, ...

. 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 on the

Stolen generations The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church mis ...

. The term mustee was also used to refer to a person with one-eighth African ancestry. The term ''

sacatra Sacatra was a term used in the French Colony of Saint-Domingue to describe one who was the descendant of one black and one griffe parent. The term is also used to describe one whose ancestry is ths black and th white. It was one of the many terms ...

'' was used to refer to one who was seven-eighths black or African and one-eighth white or European (i.e. an individual with one black and one griffe parent, or one white great-grandparent). The term ''mustefino'' refers to a person with one-sixteenth African ancestry. The terms quintroon or ''hexadecaroon'' were also used. In the

French Antilles The French West Indies or French Antilles (french: Antilles françaises, ; gcf, label= Antillean Creole, Antiy fwansez) are the parts of France located in the Antilles islands of the Caribbean: * The two overseas departments of: ** Guadeloup ...

, the following terms were usedRegent Frédéric
« Structures familiales et stratégies matrimoniales des libres de couleur en Guadeloupe au XVIIIe siècle »
Annales de démographie historique 2/2011 (n° 122), p. 69–98 during the 18th century: In Latin America, the terms griffe or

sambo , aka = Sombo (in English-speaking countries) , focus = Hybrid , country = Soviet Union , pioneers = Viktor Spiridonov, Vasili Oshchepkov, Anatoly Kharlampiev , famous_pract = List of Practitioners , olymp ...

were sometimes used for an individual of three-quarters black parentage, i.e. the child of a mulatto parent and a fully black parent.

Depiction in media

In the pre-

war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...

period, mixed-race slaves with predominantly white features were depicted in photos and other media to show whites that some slaves were visually indistinguishable from themselves, thus preventing them from seeing slaves as an ethnic " other" in order to further the abolition movement.

References

{{Authority control Multiracial affairs Mulatto African-American people

Etymology

Racial classifications

Depiction in media

See also

References