A NOTE REGARDING THE BI-RACIAL TOMFOOLERY PAGE "My Little Octoroon" Sheet Music Cover. 18
"The U. S. Government under the slave holding oligarchy, purposely kept up the 'distinctions' of 'white' and 'black', 'mulatto' and 'octoroon', etc. There can be no reasonable or useful purpose at the present day for maintaining such distinctions, unless it be to found, develop and perpetuate a pariah class, based upon a difference in complexion--really the bane, and the worst evil which threatens our country."
-Richard T. Greener, The New York Age, March 10, 1910.
In the late nineteenth century, extremely light-complexioned women bordering on white, racially speaking, resurfaced as an object of visual pleasure.
In short, light skin was in. Popular music, theater, film, literature and painting imagined the Octoroon as the perfect melodrama.
The Octoroon bore witness to the suffering of enslavement as well as its cruel injustices.
In terms of spectacle, characterization, and theme, the black scholar Richard T. Greener argued, "distinctions based upon color can only have subtle and mischievous purposes."
James E. Brunson
