An octoroon is a person having one black African or Caribbean great-grandparent, in other words, one-eighth black blood. Or an octoroon is the offspring of a quadroon and an Anglo. Octoroon, quadroon, quintroon, and hexadecaroon (one-eight, -fourth, -fifth, and -16th black blood, respectively) were historically racial categories used in Latin America and the 19th century Southern United States. The terms were also used in Australia to refer to people of mixed Aboriginal and Anglo blood. While these terms had precise definitions, in actual practice they were based on impressions of skin color rather than definite knowledge of ancestry. Many octoroons "passed" as whites, but lived in constant fear of prosecution if found out. These cultural classifications differed from the "one-drop theory" -- a single drop of black blood made a person legally black -- then used in most of the U.S. In that it recognized a higher social status for people of black descent because they had mostly white ancestry. But "-roons" were still discriminated against and often subject to slavery. The Jim Crow discrimination laws generally followed the one-drop theory. A notorious case involved Homer Plessy, a Louisiana octoroon who was prevented from sitting in a railroad car reserved for whites.The political opponents of President Warren G. Harding spread the rumour that he was an octoroon in order to discredit him in the highly racist society of the 1920s. Some of novelist William Faulkner's most tragic protagonists are octoroons.
