Charles Chesnutt, an octoroon under the American law of one drop of blood

The American writer Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was classed as an octoroon, by virtue of the peculiar "one-drop rule". Octoroon (or octaroon) is a racial term adopted in the United States for persons with one-eighth African blood, that is, 12%, as in the case of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin.

The racist regulations extended to people with a mere smidgen of African ancestry: a sedecimon was black by one-sixteenth, a trigintaduon by one thirty-second, and in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma even a man with a single black ancestor in the seventh generation was subjected to all the restrictions and prohibitions imposed on Black people.

Chesnutt, though the descendant of fairly prosperous slaveholders, considered himself an African American and was not in the least embarrassed by it, raising in his works sharp questions of class and the flagrant evils of racism, and popularising the heritage of the African peoples and their culture. So he entered the ranks of the classic Black American writers.

Alexandre Dumas was proud of being a quadroon, one-quarter black.