To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur…

To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur [people of color]. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”1

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Lousiana: Part I,” The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, Number 4 (October 1916): 361.

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