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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2944
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 01:42 am: | 
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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.
© Copyright, St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/31/news_pf/Columns/The_paper_bag_test.shtml |
Mony
Newbie Poster
Username: Mony
Post Number: 18
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 11:33 am: |
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I keep hearing the term redbone throughout this board. What does that mean? I am not familiar with that term as I am not American. Thanks in advance for any information provided. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2952
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 12:08 pm: |
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Mony, a "redbone" is a derogatory (to some) and somewhat outdated term for light skinned women.
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Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 813
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 01:03 pm: |
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Redbone =
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=redbone |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 358
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 01:24 pm: |
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"Mony, a "redbone" is a derogatory (to some) and somewhat outdated term for light skinned women."
Very true. I used to hear the term all the time also. At first I had an idea, but I wasn't sure. But I do (and I welcome anyone’s opinion who believes differently) believe the term originated from the South. I can't prove it but when I heard the term used, it was used mostly by black men who were from the South. I guess there is a cultural color caste system down there. Can’t prove that either, but I do get that impression.
I recall working with two brothers who were from Georgia and Alabama respectively. One of them used to always say; "I loves me some red bones!" (his exact words). They weren't the only ones who used the term, but I do recall they used the term constantly.
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2961
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 07:50 pm: |
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The Paper Bag Principle
Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.
Kerr, Audrey Elisa
Publication Date: 7/15/2006
Description
“This is, to my knowledge, the first full-length treatment of complexion legends and myths, filling a major gap in the literature. . . .
It treats controversial issues with great sensitivity and insight.”
—Nancy Bonvillain, Simon’s Rock College of Bard
The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”
While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.
Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities.
The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.
Audrey Kerr is associate professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her articles have appeared in Quodilibet: The Journal of Christian Theology and Philosophy, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Rhetorical Society Quarterly. Kerr is completing her second book, This Life: HIV/AIDS, Chaplaincy, and an Inner City.
http://utpress.org/a/searchdetails.php?jobno=T01085 |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 4988
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 07:57 pm: |
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Funny. I remember when I was really young hearing older Black men say "I LUV me somah dem redbones!" thinking they were referring to neckbones with A LOT of hot sauce poured over them. |
Mony
Newbie Poster
Username: Mony
Post Number: 19
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 09:09 pm: |
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Thank you all for you replies,I found them to interesting and informative. Regards
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Mony
Newbie Poster
Username: Mony
Post Number: 20
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 09:10 pm: |
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I meant to be, sorry! |
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