quarteron

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In the colonial societies of the Americas and Australia, a Quadroon ( kwah-DROON) or Quarteron (Quarter-Caste in the United Kingdom and Australia) was a person with one-quarter Sub-Saharan African or Indigenous Australian ancestry, and three-quarters European ancestry. Similar classifications were Octoroon for one-eighth Black and Quintroon for one-sixteenth Black. Governments of the time sometimes incorporated the terms in law, defining rights and restrictions. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate. The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African ancestors or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with Quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter Black ancestry.