The presence of clear coatings on atmospheric black carbon (BC) particles is known to enhance the magnitude of light absorption by the BC cores. Based on calculations using core/shell Mie theory, we demonstrate the enhancement of light absorption (<i>E</i>_Abs) by atmospheric black carbon (BC) when coated in mildly absorbing material (C_Brown) is reduced, relative to the enhancement by non-absorbing coatings (C_Clear). This reduction, sensitive to C_Brown shell thickness and imaginary refractive index (RI), can be up to 50% for 400 nm radiation and 25% averaged across the visible radiation spectrum for reasonable core/shell diameters. The enhanced direct radiative forcing possible due to the enhancement effect of C_Clear is therefore reduced if the coating is absorbing. Additionally, the need to explicitly treat BC as an internal, as opposed to external, mixture with C_Brown is shown to be important to the calculated single scatter albedo only whensub models treat BC as large spherical cores (>50 nm). For smaller BC cores (or fractal agglomerates) consideration of the BC and C_Brown as an external mixture leads to relatively small errors in the particle single scatter albedo of <0.03. It is often assumed that observation of an absorption Angstrom exponent (AAE) >1 indicates non-BC absorption. Here, it is shown that BC cores coated in C_Clearcan reasonably have an AAE of up to 1.6, a result that complicates the attribution of observed light absorption to C_Brown within ambient particles. However, an AAE<1.6 does not exclude the possibility of C_Brown, rather C_Brown cannot be confidently assigned unless AAE>1.6. Comparison of these results to some ambient AAE data shows that large-scale attribution of C_Brown is a challenging task using current in-situ measurement methods. We suggest that coincident measurements of particle core and shell sizes along with the AAE may be necessary to distinguish absorbing and non-absorbing OC.