Editing Quadroon (section)

{{short description|Historical racial classification}}
{{redirect|Quarteron|the French kickboxer |Patrice Quarteron}}
[[File:Castas 05morisca max.jpg|thumb|upright|1763 ''[[casta]]'' painting by [[Miguel Cabrera (painter)|Miguel Cabrera]] depicting a quadroon]]

In the colonial societies of the [[Americas]] and [[Australia]], a '''quadroon''' or '''quarteron''' (in the United Kingdom, the term '''quarter-caste''' is used) was a person with one-quarter [[list of ethnic groups of Africa|African]]/[[Aboriginal Australians|Aboriginal]] and three-quarters [[European peoples|European]] ancestry. Similar classifications were '''octoroon''' for one-eighth black (Latin root ''octo-'', means "eight") 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.<ref>{{cite book |last=Kottak|first=Conrad Phillip |chapter=Chapter 11: Ethnicity and Race |title=Mirror for Humanity a Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology |location=New York |publisher=[[McGraw Hill Education|McGraw-Hill]] |year=2009 |page=238 |isbn=}}</ref> The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African [[ancestor]]s or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry.