re: #191 Sergey Romanov

Stand out a bit != black. Most of his immediate ancestors were white. How can he be called a black? Was his son black too?

Well, think of it in terms of race of social construct: back in the day hypodescent was a big deal…what you looked like didn’t matter, the fact of a blood quantum was a stigma. Shit, the French and Spanish used to chart that stuff out to sixteenth just in terms of the proper terminology—bringing us charming terms as quadroon, octaroon, and hexadecaroon. You can find old ID papers from the US South that use those terms as racial categories—in Iowa you’d be white, in Louisiana you’d be an octaroon. Hell, the category was prominent enough to a meme—The Tragic Octaroon—as well as its own sexual mythology…quarter or less black was enough to be exotic and sexy but not gross and miscegenation. A lot of old New Orleans brothels advertised their prostitute’s blood quantum.

So Dumas fils got to experience a lot of social harassment for belonged to a social category that we don’t really conceptualize in the terms his peers did.