Paper Bag Party
Encyclopedia
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 population.
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.
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.
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.
As early as the 18th century, travelers remarked on the variety of color and features seen in slaves in Virginia. 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.
Newly imported Africans and darker-toned African Americans were used in hard field labor, where they were more likely 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.
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 person's 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.
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.
, 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.
Complexion
Complexion refers to the natural color, texture, and appearance of the skin, especially that of the face.-History:The word "complexion" is derived from the Late Latin complexi, which initially referred in general terms to a combination of things, and later in physiological terms, to the balance of...
at least as light as the color of a brown paper bag
Paper bag
A paper bag or paper sack is a preformed container made of paper, usually with an opening on one side. It can be one layer of paper or multiple layers of paper and other flexible materials. A bag is used for packaging and/or carrying items....
were admitted. The term also refers to larger issues of class and caste within the African-American population.
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 PortuguesePortugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
and Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
traders, African women and Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
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
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
before any came to North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
. Others were among the earliest slaves brought to the American colonies and the Chesapeake Bay area.
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
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
learned to speak English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
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
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
were in relationships between white women servants and African or African American men.
These free families became well-established with descendants moving to frontier regions of Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
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
European American
A European American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the original peoples of Europe...
community and their descendants assimilated as white. Some prominent Americans have been descended from these early free families, for instance, Ralph Bunche
Ralph Bunche
Ralph Johnson Bunche or 1904December 9, 1971) was an American political scientist and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Palestine. He was the first person of color to be so honored in the history of the Prize...
, who served as ambassador to the United Nations.
As early as the 18th century, travelers remarked on the variety of color and features seen in slaves in Virginia. 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.
Newly imported Africans and darker-toned African Americans were used in hard field labor, where they were more likely 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
Creoles of color
The Creoles of Color are a historic ethnic group of Louisiana, especially the city of New Orleans.-History:During Louisiana’s colonial period, Creole referred to people born in Louisiana with ancestors from elsewhere; i.e., all natives other than Native Americans. They used the term to separate...
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 that this group 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 remained somewhat common in modern society.Twentieth century
From 1900 until about 1950 in the larger black neighborhoods of major AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
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 person's 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.
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
High yellow
High yellow, occasionally simply yellow , is a term for very light-skinned persons of Black descent. It is a reference to the golden yellow skin tone of some mixed-race people...
' 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.
In culture
In her 1983 novel The Color PurpleThe Color Purple
The Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction...
, Alice Walker
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...
wrote about the effects of skin color.
In his 1987 film School Daze
School Daze
School Daze is a 1988 American musical-drama film, written and directed by Spike Lee, and starring Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, and Tisha Campbell-Martin...
, Spike Lee
Spike Lee
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983....
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
Wendy Raquel Robinson
Wendy Raquel Robinson is an American actress. She is best known for her roles as high school principal Regina Grier on the WB sitcom The Steve Harvey Show, and as sports agent Tasha Mack on the CW/BET comedy-drama The Game....
, Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...
, Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
, Marita Golden
Marita Golden
Marita Golden is an award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, distinguished teacher of writing and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers....
, Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
, Kola Boof, Audrey Elisa Kerr, Venus Mason Theus, and Wallace Thurman.
See also
- High yellowHigh yellowHigh yellow, occasionally simply yellow , is a term for very light-skinned persons of Black descent. It is a reference to the golden yellow skin tone of some mixed-race people...
- Black is BeautifulBlack is beautifulBlack is beautiful is a cultural movement that began in the United States of America in the 1960s by African Americans. It later spread to much of the black world, most prominently in the writings of the Black Consciousness Movement of Steve Biko in South Africa...
- ColorismColorismColorism is prejudice or discrimination in which human beings are accorded differing social treatment based on skin color. The preference often gets translated into economic status because of opportunities for work. Colorism can be found across the world...
- Quadroon balls, earlier Creole-exclusive social events, within plaçagePlaçagePlaçage was a recognized extralegal system in which white French and Spanish and later Creole men entered into the equivalent of common-law marriages with women of African, Indian and white Creole descent. The term comes from the French placer meaning "to place with"...
- Passing (racial identity)Passing (racial identity)Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...
- Pencil test
- Venus Mason Theus
External links
- THE PAPER BAG TEST, an editorial by Bill Maxwell about blacks discriminating against blacks, St. Petersburg Times, August 31, 2003, discusses the history of the test.
- http://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/Story?id=548303&page=1