The presence of clear coatings on atmospheric black carbon (<i>BC</i>) particles is known to enhance the magnitude of light absorption by the <i>BC</i> cores. Based on calculations using core/shell Mie theory, we demonstrate that the enhancement of light absorption (<i>E</i><sub>Abs</sub>) by atmospheric black carbon (<i>BC</i>) when it is coated in mildly absorbing material (<i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub>) is reduced relative to the enhancement induced by non-absorbing coatings (<i>C</i><sub>Clear</sub>). This reduction, sensitive to both the <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> coating thickness and imaginary refractive index (<i>RI</i>), 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 <i>C</i><sub>Clear</sub> is therefore reduced if the coating is absorbing. Additionally, the need to explicitly treat <i>BC</i> as an internal, as opposed to external, mixture with <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> is shown to be important to the calculated single scatter albedo only when models treat <i>BC</i> as large spherical cores (>50 nm). For smaller <i>BC</i> cores (or fractal agglomerates) consideration of the <i>BC</i> and <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> as an external mixture leads to relatively small errors in the particle single scatter albedo of <0.03. It has often been assumed that observation of an absorption Angström exponent (<i>AAE</i>)>1 indicates absorption by a non-<i>BC</i> aerosol. Here, it is shown that <i>BC</i> cores coated in <i>C</i><sub>Clear</sub> can reasonably have an <i>AAE</i> of up to 1.6, a result that complicates the attribution of observed light absorption to <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> within ambient particles. However, an <i>AAE</i><1.6 does not exclude the possibility of <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub>; rather <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> cannot be confidently assigned unless <i>AAE</i>>1.6. Comparison of these model results to various ambient <i>AAE</i> measurements demonstrates that large-scale attribution of <i>C</i><sub>Brown</sub> is a challenging task using current in-situ measurement methods. We suggest that coincident measurements of particle core and shell sizes along with the <i>AAE</i> may be necessary to distinguish absorbing and non-absorbing OC.