Solid write up! You’ve changed my opinion. I had thought terms like “octoroon” were merely archaic descriptors, had never thought of the “one drop” angle and what that implied.
Holy shit! There’s even a word for all this!
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
1/64th: Sang-mêlé. My god, that’s a laugh-out-loud racist word if I ever heard one. How far back did they want to go?!
For anyone else finding this interesting, this might be the opening of a rabbit hole: