Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroon deals heavily with racial themes. The most overt of this is Zoe’s status as an “Octoroon,” a person who is one-eighth black. The story overtly concerns racial identification, making it clear that even a small amount of African American blood would “taint” a person at that time, making them unable to marry a white person and, depending on their mother (whose status determined whether or not their children are slaves), potentially born into slavery. Zoe tells George: “Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the blood” (43). Paul is also regarded as a slave and referred to by other characters as a “darkey” (43), although he is only one-quarter black (then referred to as a “quadroon”).

Given its 19th century Southern setting, the play is also filled with numerous examples of racial discrimination beyond the institution of slavery, even by the play’s more “sympathetic” characters. Mrs. Peyton, for instance, refers to her slaves’ “black ungainly faces” (32) even as she extols her love for them, while Scudder speaks directly of the “protection, forbearance, gentleness” and other “goods that show the critters the difference between the Christian and the savage” (72).