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Examples

  • Wells was denounced by racist Southern and Northern dailies, including the New York Times, which called her a "slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress."

    Jeff Cohen: What Indy Media Trailblazers Can Teach Us 2008

  • Wells was denounced by racist Southern and Northern dailies, including the New York Times, which called her a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress.”

    What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us 2008

  • Dillon, proprietor of the Montreal Hotel in security for payment, delivered to his creditor a mulatress, a slave called Ledy, aged 26 years.

    The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 Various

  • You see young girls of remarkably elegant presence, -- young colored girls well educated and _élevées-en-chapeau_ [23] (that is say, brought up like white creole girls, dressed and accomplished like them), voluntarily leave rich homes to nurse some poor mulatress or capresse in the indigent quarters of the town, because the sick one happens to be a distant relative.

    Two Years in the French West Indies Lafcadio Hearn 1877

  • "From a thousand to two thousand dollars, perhaps, as she is a negress but if she were a mulatress she would bring more, or if a quadroon most of all -- other things being equal."

    Self-Raised Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth 1859

Comments

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  • "In 1857, a French handbook connected red and race in even more explicit fashion, stating that 'women with jet-black hair and very dark skin should not wear red clothing (Oh shut your face. --Ed.), because this color darkens their complexions even more and makes them look like mulatresses." In succeeding decades, as factories churned out ever-increasing amounts of synthetic dye, the racialization of bright colors only gathered pace."

    Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 251.

    See also comments on colorless, colored, snazzy, and Carmen.

    October 6, 2017