Quote: conservgramma wrote in post #14

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WOW Polybius. Thanks for that informative post!

My brain is spinning.

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I first found out about Casta Paintings while visiting the Denver Museum of Art during a conference in Denver. The Museum has a large collection of them by different 18th Century Spanish colonial artists. Up until then, I did not know that the Spanish colonial classifications were so complex.

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-century Mexico
By Ilona Katzew

http://books.google.com/books?id=2I6i1FF...ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA

In the U.S., during the slavery era, the racial clasifications were also very precise:

Black
White
Mulatto: One Black parent and one White parent
Sambo: Three black grandparents as a result of a mix between Black and Mulatto
Quadroon: One black grandparent as a result of a mix between White and Mulatto
Octaroon: One black great-grandparent as a result of a mix between a Quadroon and White

In the U.S., however, the "One Drop Rule" meant that an individual had to completely hide any Black ancestry if they were ever to be considered "White".

The Mark Twain novel, "Pudd'nhead Wilson", is a tale of such race mixing. The house slave, Roxy, is the product of a White father and an Octaroon mother due to the slave owners preferring the lighter-skined slaves as mistresses. So, Roxy is 1/16th Black. When Roxy's own son is born, he is 1/32 Black and is as White as her Master's new-born son that she is taking care of. So, in order to spare her own "Black" infant son from a life of slavery, Roxy switches the babies so that her own son is raised as the future Master of the house and the actual White baby is raised as a slave.

When "Nurture versus Nature" takes over, Roxy's biological "Black" son grows up to be an arrogant, spoiled brat while the White Master's son grows up to be a loving son that loves his "mother", Roxy.

I will not spoil the ending. The novel is available, free, on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=goWwAAA...%27nhead+Wilson