mulatto, a person of mixed white and Black ancestry. The term mulatto is a legacy of attempts to establish taxonomies of race, a concept that science has shown to be socially constructed and to have no biological basis. Much of the significance of mulatto identity is grounded in the social, economic, and political consequences of colonialism, slavery, and segregation in the New World (Western Hemisphere). The connotations of the term mulatto and applications of the notion of mulatto identity have varied between cultures in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Today in North America mulatto is considered to be a dated and offensive term.
Black-white sexual unions during the slavery era in the North American colonies and later the United States most often were of an oppressive nature between promiscuous white (European-descended) male enslavers and enslaved Black women. By virtue of generally having lighter skin colour, the progeny of these sexual unions were visibly distinguishable from enslaved persons who were solely of African descent. The extent to which enslaved individuals of mixed ancestry received preferential treatment is debatable—though mulattoes benefited conspicuously from manumission, as enslavers sometimes granted freedom to their own children. Nonetheless, that the distinctiveness of these mixed-race persons was recognized is undeniable and is reflected in the coining of the term mulatto, which generally signified anyone of mixed Black-white heritage but also was used more specifically to identify individuals as half white and half Black—that is, persons who had one white parent and one Black parent.
In some settings, this “racial” classification was further refined. The term quadroon referred to individuals who were thought to be of one-fourth African descent and three-fourths European descent; the term octoroon referred to individuals who were thought to be of one-eighth African descent and seven-eighths European descent; and the term griffe was assigned to those who were regarded as being of one-fourth European descent and three-fourths African descent. By the dawn of the era of Jim Crow segregation, any African heritage at all was sufficient to qualify a person as a mulatto. The prevalent and controlling notion that as little as “one drop of Black blood” meant that an individual was Black under the law had sweeping consequences in the segregated South. Against this backdrop some persons of mixed heritage sought to “pass” as white.
By the late 20th century, in the wake of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, the number of persons of mixed “racial” ancestry was rapidly increasing and the term mulatto had come to be regarded as offensive. Instead, Americans of mixed Black-white ancestry often preferred to identify themselves as biracial, mixed, or simply “other.”
In Latin America the genetic and cultural mixing between Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous peoples had started almost immediately during the colonial era. The children of mixed unions were viewed as socially distinct from their parents, and new social classifications were formulated to reflect this perception. Although mestizo (“mixed person”) was a general label, it frequently was applied specifically to people of mixed Indigenous and European heritage. A person of African and European descent was generally referred to as mulato (the Spanish cognate of mulatto), a term that is still widely used in Latin America. Pardo, literally “brown person,” also was often used to refer to an individual of African-European ancestry, though in Venezuela it referred more specifically to a person of mixed African, European, and Indigenous ancestry. The term zambo referred to an individual of mixed African and Indigenous descent. Spanish colonists sought to establish a hierarchical system of socio-racial classes known as a sociedad de castas (“society of castes”), but Portuguese colonists took a less pedantic approach to race. Indeed, Brazilians have long prided themselves on the widespread belief in their country that blurring “racial” lines through mixed sexual unions is the best solution for racism.