*On this date in 1790, the Quadroon community of the United States of America was addressed. They are part of the Western hemisphere's racial and color caste classification.
This date was chosen because, beginning on this date, the first census in the United States took place. In the slave societies of the Americas, a quadroon or quarteron was a person with one-quarter black African and three-quarters white European ancestry (or, in Australia, one-quarter Aboriginal ancestry). Similar classifications were octoroon for one-eighth Black (Latin root octo-, means "eight") and hexadecanoic for one-sixteenth Black. Governments sometimes incorporate the terms in law, defining rights and restrictions.
Using such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group that the dominant group perceives as subordinate. The racial designations refer to the number of full-blooded African ancestors or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter of Black ancestry. The word quadroon was borrowed from the French quarteron and the Spanish cuarterón, which have their root in the Latin Quartus, meaning "a quarter." Similarly, the Spanish cognate cuarterón is used to describe cuarterón de mulatto or morisco (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter Black) and cuarterón de mestizo or castizo (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter Indian), especially in Caribbean South America.
In Latin America, which had a variety of terms for racial groups, some terms for quadroons were morisco or chino, see casta. The term mulatto was used to designate a biracial person with one fully Black parent and one fully white parent or a person whose parents are both mulattoes. In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance, on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of the mixed race without regard for a proportion of ancestries. The term octoroon refers 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 the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
As with 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 generation. Terceron was a term synonymous with octoroon, derived from being three generations of an African ancestor (great-grandparent). Mustee was also used to refer to a person with one-eighth African ancestry. The term sacatra was used to refer to one 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. Notable quadroons are Thomas-Alexandre Dumas and Alexandre Dumas fils.
