What Color Is your Racism?... The Brown Bag Tests: Colorism When I was in the 5th grade, we were taught about this in our school during Black History month... so for all of you who dont know the history or have ever heard of the Brown Paper Bag Test... Here it is... *********************************** Paper bag parties were 20th century African-American social events at which only individuals with complexions at least as light as the color of a brown paper bag were admitted. The term also refers to larger issues of class and caste within the African-American community. Free African Americans The historian Ira Berlin noted the emergence in the 16th and 17th centuries of Atlantic Creoles, people of color descended from the multinational peoples in African ports where Portuguese and Spanish traders, African women and Arab traders congregated. Some were enslaved with their mothers; others were freed. They tended to learn multiple languages and found work at the trading posts on the edges of African settlements, especially at the places where Europeans bought slaves. Sometimes the multiracial Creoles would work as overseers or translators. They started sailing with the Portuguese and some went to Europe before any came to North America. Others were among the earliest slaves brought to the American colonies and the Chesapeake Bay area.[1] In the early Chesapeake Bay Colony, some Africans came as indentured servants. Others arrived as slaves, but in the early years could sometimes be freed from slavery through work. Most Europeans arrived as indentured servants, agreeing to work for a period to pay off their passage. Some Native Americans learned to speak English and adopted English customs. All these groups lived and worked together; boundaries were more fluid than after slavery became institutionalized as a racial caste. Colonial records show that some African slaves were freed as early as the 17th century. More significantly, researchers have found that the origins of most of the free people of color before the American Revolution were in relationships between white women servants and African or African American men.[2] These free families became well-established with descendants moving to frontier regions of Virginia, North Carolina and west as areas opened up. Free Indians who lived in English communities also married into these communities. There they were free of the strictures of plantation areas and were often well-accepted by white neighbors. Many became property owners. Some multiracial communities married within their common group; other free African Americans consistently married out into the European American community and their descendants assimilated as white. Some prominent Americans have been descended from these early free families, for instance, Ralph Bunche, who served as ambassador to the United Nations.[2] As early as the 18th century, travelers remarked on the variety of color and features seen in slaves in Virginia, including those in households of prominent men like Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and his father-in-law both had relationships with enslaved women that resulted in several children, most of whom later worked in the household. Light-skinned slaves were sometimes given better treatment on plantations, with domestic jobs inside the master’s house, including as companions or maids to his legal children. Some of them were educated or at least allowed to learn to read. Sometimes the master might arrange for an apprenticeship for his mulatto son and free him upon its completion, especially in the first decade after the American Revolution, when numerous slaves were freed in the Upper South. In the Upper South, from the Revolution to 1810, the percentage of people of color who were free increased from 1 to more than 10 percent. By 1810 75% of blacks in Delaware were free.[3] Newly imported Africans and darker-toned African Americans were used in hard field labor, where they were likelier to experience abuse. As tensions about slaver uprisings rose in the 19th century, slave states imposed more restrictions, including prohibitions on educating slaves and on slaves movements. The slaves themselves could be punished for trying to learn to read and write. In Louisiana especially, Creoles of color had long formed a third class during the years of slavery. They had achieved a high level of literacy and sophistication under French and Spanish rule, becoming educated, taking the names of white fathers or lovers, and often receiving property from the white men involved with their families. Many became artisans, property owners and sometimes slaveholders themselves. Unlike in the Upper South, where free African Americans varied widely in appearance, free people of color in New Orleans and the Deep South tended to be light-skinned. The privileges of Creoles of color began to be curtailed after the Louisiana Purchase, when American slaveholders arrived who tended to view all people of color as of one class: black, or, not white. After the Civil War When four million slaves were emancipated and granted citizenship in the South, new issues arose both for whites and for free people of color. When slavery ended, some light-skinned blacks, especially those who were called old Issue for having been free long before the war, resisted being grouped with freedmen. They created social organizations that excluded darker blacks, as they assumed they had just been released from slavery. The free people of color were proud of their education and property rights. This is an example of within-race colorism. These practices have become somewhat common in modern day society.[4] Twentieth century From 1900 until about 1950 in the larger black neighborhoods of major American cities, paper bag parties are said to have taken place. Some organizations used the brown paper bag principle as a test for entrance. People at many churches, fraternities and nightclubs would take a brown paper bag and hold it against a persons skin. If a person was lighter or the same color as the bag, he or she was admitted. People whose skin was not lighter than a brown paper bag were denied entry.[5] There is, too, a curious color dynamic that sadly persists in our culture. In fact, New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party — usually at a gathering in a home — where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. On my many trips to New Orleans, whether to lecture at one of its universities or colleges, to preach from one of its pulpits, or to speak at an empowerment seminar during the annual Essence Music Festival, I have observed color politics at work among black folk. The cruel color code has to be defeated by our love for one another. Michael Eric Dyson, excerpt from Come Hell or High Water. This is one of the ways that light-skinned black people (so called High-Yellow Negroes or Creoles in Louisiana) attempted to isolate and distinguish themselves from darker-skinned blacks. Even in contemporary American society, psychological studies have shown African-American and white participants both demonstrate colorism, in which they perceive light-skinned blacks to be smarter, wealthier, and happier than those of darker skin.[citation needed] Brown paper bag reflected in culture In her 1983 novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker wrote about the effects of skin color. In his 1987 film School Daze, Spike Lee satirized colorism and the paper bag test at elite historically black colleges. He created a scene in which light-skinned and dark-skinned young women face off using names like tar baby, Barbie Doll, wannabe white and jigaboo. Comedian Paul Mooney uses colorism and the paper bag test in some of his comedy. For example, in one routine he says, At home where I come from, Louisiana, we have the saying for it: If you brown, hang around. If you yellow, you mellow. If you white, you all right. If you black, get back. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard, wrote about personal brown paper bag experiences in his book The Future of the Race. Other authors who have written about the brown paper bag test are Wendy Raquel Robinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Marita Golden, Toni Morrison, Kola Boof, Audrey Elisa Kerr, Venus Mason Theus, and Wallace Thurman. ************************************************************ brown paper bag test 200 up, 34 down buy brown paper bag test mugs, tshirts and magnetsAn actual test, along with the so-called ruler test in common use in the the early 1900s among upper class Black American societies and families to determine if a Black person was sufficiently white to gain admittance or acceptance. If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag, you did not merit inclusion. Thousands of Black institutions including the nations most eminent Black fraternity -- Phi Alpha Phi, Howard Univiersity, and numerous church and civic groups all practiced this discriminiation. The practice has 19th Century antecedants with the Blue Blood Society and has not totally died out. Zora Neal Hurston was the first well known writer to air this strange practice in a public. The practice is now nearly universally condemned (at least in public) as being an example of colorism. Particularly cogent modern day critiques can be found in Kathy Russells The Color Complex, Tony Morrions The Bluest Eye (an Ophrey Book Club choice) and Marita Goldens Dont Play in the Sun. The best known send-up of the pactice, however, is Spike Lees scathing and hilarious 1988 movie, School Daze. Though the brown paper bag test is antiquated and frowned upon as a shameful moment in African-American history, the ideals behind the practice still lingers in the African-American community -- Rivea Ruff, BlackCollegeView.Com colorism ruler test blue veins redbones howard university slavery racism brown bag univerisities by Bill Peters Aug 19, 2006 share this __________________________________________________________ womanATtheWell I never heard of this nor were we taught this when I was in grade school. I saw School Daze and of course Color Purple. I guess I spent a lot of times laffing at the characters and less time getting the message. Thanks for the history lesson Grannee. theelect.myfreeforum.org
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 04:02:17 +0000
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