General Dumas: mulatto

Alexandre Dumas, father: quadroon

Alexandre Dumas fils: octoroon

Quadroon

The word "quadroon" was borrowed from the French quarteron, and Spanish cuarterón, which have their roots in the Latin quartus, meaning fourth.



The word octoroon is rooted in the Latin octo, which means eight.

Quarter White or European

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.^[2]

Half and half

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.

Quarter Black or African descent

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.

Eighth Black or African descent

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. In Latin America, a term for octoroon is albino.^{[citation needed]}

Terceron was a term synonymous with octoroon, derived from being three generations of descent from an African ancestor (great-grandparent).

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

Sixteenth Black or African descent

The term mustefino refers to a person with one-sixteenth African ancestry. The terms "quintroon" or "hexadecaroon" were also used.

Favoritism

During the antebellum period, abolitionists featured mulattoes and other light-skinned former slaves in public lectures in the North, to arouse public sentiments against slavery by showing Northerners slaves who were visually indistinguishable from them, preventing them from putting the people in the category of "other