octoroon

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The homogenous representation of Latinos on the big screen stems from a larger issue, says Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He describes a longstanding ideology in Latin America that emphasizes pride in building a mixed-race society. “It’s attached to this idea of what’s called mestizo, which is, as the word describes, the phenomenon of racial mixture in Latin America and how it’s different from the United States,” Morales says. Black Latinos’ ancestors were brought to South America and the Caribbean by the same transatlantic slave trade that delivered enslaved people to the U.S., but after emancipation, U.S. law forbade interracial marriages, whereas Latin-America did not. “Latinos in the U.S. grew up with this idea that Latinos are mixed-race and so are incapable of racism. And that allows them to sort of marginalize and ignore Afro-Latinos who are often the victims of overt or subtle discrimination.”

Andrea Marks, “How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation,” Rolling Stone, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/in-the-heights-casting-colorism-afro-latino-1184945/.

octoroon

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

Octoroon means a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genealogically, it means one-eighth black. Typically an Octoroon has one great-grandparent who is of full African descent and seven great-grandparents who are not.

hexadecaroon (1/16th)
dotriacontaroon (1/32)
tetrahexacontaroon (1/64)
octaicosahectaroon (1/128)
hexapentacontadictaroon (1/256)
dodecapentactaroon (1/512)
tetraicosakiliaroon (1/1,024)
octatetracontadiliaroon (1/2,048)
hexanonacontatetraliaroon (1/4,096)
dinonacontahectaoctaliaroon (1/8,192)

See IUPAC numerical multipliers.

Tags: hypodescent

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 21:48Z and is filed under Definitions, History, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Mixed Race Studies

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