Colorism: The paper bag test
Ayinde:
Colorism
Colorism is a form of black-on-black racism, based on skin-tone, exemplified in terms such as "high yellow" (sometimes written and/or pronounced as "high yaller") as well as the "brown paper bag test". There seems to be an implicit calculus behind this belief that makes the goodness of the individual inversely related to the darkness of his/her skin.
The brown paper bag test was a ritual once practiced by certain African-American sororities and fraternities who discriminated against people who were "too black". That is, these groups would not let anyone into the sorority or fraternity whose skin tone was darker than a paper bag. Spike Lee's film School Daze satirizes this practice.
The paper bag test
By BILL MAXWELL, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 31, 2003
Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission receives about 85,000 discrimination cases, a phenomenon to be expected in a society that touts itself as a "melting pot."
Many of these cases involve the complaints of minority groups against majority groups. We rarely expect a member of a minority group to discriminate against someone else in the same group. But that is exactly what happens among African-Americans.
More than any other minority group in the United States, blacks discriminate against one another. The discrimination, called "colorism," is based on skin tone: whether a person is dark-skinned or light-skinned or in the broad middle somewhere.
Most African-Americans refuse to discuss this self-destructive problem even in private. According to the EEOC, though, the number of such cases are steadily increasing, jumping from 413 in fiscal year 1994 to 1,382 in 2002, a figure that represents about 3 percent of all cases the agency receives yearly.
The most recent case making news in the black press involves two employees of an Applebee's restaurant in Jonesboro, Ga., near Atlanta. There, Dwight Burch, a dark-skinned waiter, who has left the restaurant, filed a lawsuit against Applebee's and his light-skinned African-American manager.
In the suit, Burch alleged that during his three-month stint, the manager repeatedly referred to him as a "black monkey" and a "tar baby." The manager also told Burch to bleach his skin, and Burch was fired after he refused to do so, the suit states.
Colorism has a long and ugly history among American blacks, dating back to slavery, when light-skinned blacks were automatically given preferential treatment by plantation owners and their henchmen.
Colorism's history is fascinating: Fair-skinned slaves automatically enjoyed plum jobs in the master's house, if they had to work at all. Many traveled throughout the nation and abroad with their masters and their families. They were exposed to the finer things, and many became educated as a result. Their darker-tone peers toiled in the fields. They were the ones who were beaten, burned and hanged, the ones permanently condemned to be the lowest of the low in U.S. society. For them, even learning - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic - was illegal.
When slavery ended, light-skinned blacks established social organizations that barred darker ex-slaves. Elite blacks of the early 20th century were fair-skinned almost to the person. Even today, most blacks in high positions have fair skin tones, and most blacks who do menial jobs or are in prison are dark. Believe it or not, popular black magazines, such as Ebony as Essence, prefer light-skinned models in their beauty product ads.
For many years, entrance to special social events operated on the "brown paper bag" principle, which I will explain. Until quite recently, black fraternities and sororities, for example, recruited according to skin tone. Spike Lee's film School Daze satirizes the problem, and Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple makes it a biting subtext.
In his 1996 book The Future of the Race, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard, described his encounter with the brown paper bag when he came to Yale in the late 1960s, when skin-tone bias was brazenly practiced: "Some of the brothers who came from New Orleans held a "bag party.' As a classmate explained it to me, a bag party was a New Orleans custom wherein a brown paper bag was stuck on the door.
"Anyone darker than the bag was denied entrance. That was one cultural legacy that would be put to rest in a hurry - we all made sure of that. But in a manner of speaking, it was replaced by an opposite test whereby those who were deemed "not black enough' ideologically were to be shunned. I was not sure this was an improvement."
Gates was overly optimistic. The brown paper bag test remains in black culture in various incarnations, as the Applebee's case and the EEOC's statistics confirm. We separate ourselves by skin tone almost as much as we ever did. If, say, you check out the "desired" female beauties in rap videos, you will find redbones galore.
Back to the Applebee's case. A spokesman for the chain issued this statement: "No one should have to put up with mean and humiliating comments about the color of their skin on the job. . . . It makes no difference that these comments are made by someone of your own race. Actually, that makes it even worse." Although the chain denied the allegations, it paid Burch $40,000 to settle the suit.
Now for the irony of ironies: Applebee's has added a protection, along with cultural sensitivity training, against skin-tone discrimination to its antidiscrimination policies.
In other words, the company must protect African-Americans from other African-Americans.
Discrimination from whites and other groups remains a big problem for blacks. But colorism is just as serious, if not more so. Colorism saps our strength from the inside. It weakens our power and ability to fight the outside forces that keep us marginalized in larger society.
Correction
The Tamiami Trail was misidentified as Alligator Alley in Bill Maxwell's Aug. 27 column.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/31/Columns/The_paper_bag_test.shtml
Oshun_Auset:
There was also something reffered to as the the Blue Vein Society; to join, a person had to be light enough that their veins were visible at the wrist. I also read of a church who would hang a fine toothed comb(meant for European/Whites) over the doorway by a string. If you couldn't pass it easily through your hair, you couldn't enter. Churches used the paper-bag test as well; into the early 20th century there were Black churches that painted their doors brown, and worshippers had to have skin color lighter than the door to be invited to join the congregation. The books Color Complex and Skin/Deep go into great detail about these things.
The form may have changed but the essence remains the same. Colorism is netrenched in this global capitalist apologist, white supremacist society. The only thing that will change it is organization of the masses of oppressed and exploited peoples and individual action counteracting it.
Quote
Discrimination from whites and other groups remains a big problem for blacks. But colorism is just as serious, if not more so. Colorism saps our strength from the inside. It weakens our power and ability to fight the outside forces that keep us marginalized in larger society.
Very well put.
Ayinde:
Oshun Auset said:Quote
"The form may have changed but the essence remains the same. Colorism is netrenched in this global capitalist apologist, white supremacist society. The only thing that will change it is organization of the masses of oppressed and exploited peoples and individual action counteracting it."
This really says nothing to me, and it is the same line I have seen quickly repeated on this board before you came here. Colorism is also entrenched in people of all colors and nationalities today.
Think of Whites telling Blacks that "racism is rooted in this global capitalist apologist, white supremacist society. The only thing that will change it is organization of the masses of oppressed and exploited peoples and individual action counteracting it."
Well coming from a white person I would just leave them to babble, as it really says 'nothing'. It is slightly different but not too far off for me to say I feel the same about all other light-skinned people 'telling' dark-skinned Blacks to organize. It is not like I have some dislike for them, or White people, but I would expect them to respect the right of the people most affected by the system to advocate the solution.
Usually before this issue is properly reasoned out, there is a rush to 'solution', and calls to organize. Even the discussions on Racism, Gender discrimination and Colorism are not solutions. These discussions are supposed to lead people to an understanding of how to ensure that those who are most receptive to, and affected by, these social ills get to directly benefit from the moves to resolve it.
As I have said earlier, any attempt to come together (organize) with this issue out there, means that dark-skinned Blacks are expected to support light-skinned ones to get ahead based on the same unfair privileges. Any mobilization that is not taking all of this into account is bound to repeat the same errors.
There is no way White people can prove with words that they no longer hold racist assumptions. There is no way anyone can prove with words that they are above Colorism and gender discrimination. But there is a way to operate that ensures that people who receive unfair privileges in the system are not used as symbols for change, and are not the first to get recognition or material benefits from attempts to change the system.
There is a lot more to discuss about Colorism before I share some of my views on how people can operate to ensure that those who are privileged in this corrupt system do not block others from progressing.
Oshun_Auset:
Quote
This really says nothing to me, and it is the same line I have seen quickly repeated on this board before you came here. Colorism is also entrenched in people of all colors and nationalities today.
Think of Whites telling Blacks that "racism is rooted in this global capitalist apologist, white supremacist society. The only thing that will change it is organization of the masses of oppressed and exploited peoples and individual action counteracting it."
Well coming from a white person I would just leave them to babble, as it really says 'nothing'. It is slightly different but not too far off for me to say I feel the same about all other light-skinned people 'telling' dark-skinned Blacks to organize. It is not like I have some dislike for them, or White people, but I would expect them to respect the right of the people most affected by the system to advocate the solution.
Usually before this issue is properly reasoned out, there is a rush to 'solution', and calls to organize. Even the discussions on Racism, Gender discrimination and Colorism are not solutions. These discussions are supposed to lead people to an understanding of how to ensure that those who are most receptive to, and affected by, these social ills get to directly benefit from the moves to resolve it.
As I have said earlier, any attempt to come together (organize) with this issue out there, means that dark-skinned Blacks are expected to support light-skinned ones to get ahead based on the same unfair privileges. Any mobilization that is not taking all of this into account is bound to repeat the same errors.
There is no way White people can prove with words that they no longer hold racist assumptions. There is no way anyone can prove with words that they are above Colorism and gender discrimination. But there is a way to operate that ensures that people who receive unfair privileges in the system are not used as symbols for change, and are not the first to get recognition or material benefits from attempts to change the system.
There is a lot more to discuss about Colorism before I share some of my views on how people can operate to ensure that those who are privileged in this corrupt system do not block others from progressing.
The comment was directly taken from The AAPRP(All African People's Revolutionary Party) ideological training guidelines, not my personal beliefs...Hence it was coming from the ideology of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Marcus Garvey, and the masses of African people on the continent and in the diaspora and their struggle, as well as other Pan-Africansits who developed this ideology who are not 'light skinned'. I am repeating these words from my ideological training in this organization....not from my own personal ideas that I came up with. I am not "telling" my darker brothers and sisters anything...in fact this information was taught to me throught the struggles of the masses of my darker brothers and sisters...I just happen to be in agreement with it. So if you have an ideological argument with it or disagree with it, you do not aggree with the personalities that came up with it as a solution at the 5th Pan-African congress, not me. It therfeore seems that your attack on this ideological statement is unfounded because you are responding to who you wrongly percieved came up with this ideology and statement. It is Nkrumahism-Turaism. Not Oshun-Ausetism. Knowing who the authors of this statement are, has your opinion of the statement now changed? Or does the ideology formed at the 5th Pan-African Congress, largely authored by Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Ture, as well as promoted by Kwame Ture still "mean nothing to you"? If you disagree with it in general that is one thing. But from what you have stated it seems you were criticizing it because you thought it originated from a light skinned person trying to tell other dark skined people what to do...Which is not the case. This solution originated from "the people most affected by the system". So therefore, I am respecting these people by taking on this ideology.
Ayinde:
Oshun_Auset Quote
The comment was directly taken from The AAPRP(All African People's Revolutionary Party) ideological training guidelines, not my personal beliefs...
Well if the statement was directly taken from others, it would have been good to put their names to it (credit them). Here the real authors were overshadowed again.
My opinion is the same, especially in the context of exploring Colorism with mixed-race light-skinned people. Prematurely using those statements before an issue is properly aired can be viewed as an attempt to discourage proper examination of the issue.
I am not supposed to accept what they say in the context others use it. I am also saying that whatever they explored then, we now have to take into consideration other factors like Colorism. I am sure I know the meaning of what they said, and not just the words. In that regard, I am cool expressing for myself how I feel and think on any matter.
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