Meaning of Octoroon | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Someone having one-eighth black ancestry.
   dated, historical
2. Someone having 1/64th black ancestry: the child of a quintoon and a white man.
   dated, historical

Equivalents

Examples

“Yet the least drop of Spanish blood, if it be only of quadroon or octoroon, is sufficient to raise them from the rank of slaves, and entitle them to a suit of clothes—boots, hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, and all complete, though coarse and dirty as may be,—and to call themselves Españolos, and to hold property, if they can get any.”

“There would have been no legal barrier to their union; there would have been no frightful menace to white supremacy in the marriage of the negro and the octoroon: the drop of dark blood bridged the chasm.”

“I dare say he has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty.”

“Grandmother Baxter was a quadroon or an octoroon, or in any case she was nearly white.”

“That's Balthios, the octoroon great grandson of Lebron James. He doesn't like to talk about himself, but he's a good guy.”

“It was the racist, settler colonialism that created whiteness, that created blackness, half-caste, quarter-caste, octoroon, that saw mixed-race people as a third race. […] Protectors took the mixed-race children, ‘half-castes’, ‘quarter-castes’, ‘octoroons’, from their parents, from their culture, raised the light-skinned ones white, at an orphanage, and trained the darker-skinned ones to be domestic servants for the colonisers.”

“Quintoon: child of mustiphini and white male Unspeakable: child of mustiphini and white woman Octoroon: child of quintoon and white man Unspeakable: child of quintoon and white woman”

CEFR level