Skin color

Human skin color varies from a melanin-rich dark brown (called "black"), to a lighter brown or "red", to "yellow" and to a pinkish tan called "white".

A person who is born of both black and a white parent was usually called "mulatto" in the United States, well past the end of the American Civil War. The term was also commonly used in the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations. Racial terms like mulatto and quadroon (one black grandparent, three whites) fell into disuse thereafter, in part because of the insulting roots of the word: "mulatto" is derived from the Spanish word for "mule".