An individual darker than a brown paper bag was denied privileges.
"The brown paper bag test" is a term in African-American oral history used to describe a racist discriminatory practice within the African-American community in the 20th century, in which an individual's skin tone is compared to the color of a brown paper bag. The test was used to determine what privileges an individual could have; only those with a skin color that matched or was lighter than a brown paper bag were allowed admission or membership privileges. The test was believed by many to be used in the 20th century by many African-American social institutions such as sororities, fraternities, and social clubs.[1]
The term is also used in reference to larger issues of class and social stratification and colorism within the African-American population. People were barred from having access to several public spaces and resources because of their darker complexion.[2] The test was used at the entrance to social functions wherein a brown paper bag was stuck at the door and anyone who was darker than the bag was denied entry.
Color discrimination
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Black athletes with various skin tonesPrivilege has long been associated with skin tone in the African-American community, dating back to the era of slavery. Mixed-race children of European American fathers were sometimes given privileges ranging from more desirable work, apprenticeships or formal education, to allocation of property or even freedom from enslavement. African Americans "contributed to colorism because they have benefited from the privilege of having a skin color closer to that of European Americans and have embraced the notion that privilege comes with having light skin in America".[3] Lighter-skinned people were afforded certain social and economic advantages over darker-skinned people, even while suffering discrimination. According to Gordon, "light-skinned blacks formed exclusive clubs" after African slavery was abolished in the United States.[4] Some clubs were called "Blue Vein Societies", suggesting that if an individual's skin was light enough to show the blue cast of veins, they had more European ancestry (and, therefore, higher social standing).[4] Such discrimination was resented by African Americans with darker complexions. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his book The Future of the Race (1996), the practice of the brown paper bag test may have originated in New Orleans, Louisiana, where there was a substantial third class of free people of color dating from the French colonial era.[5] The test was related to ideas of beauty, in which some people believed that lighter skin and more European features, in general, were more attractive.
From 1900 until about 1950, "paper bag parties" are said to have taken place in neighborhoods of major American cities with a high concentration of African Americans. Many churches, fraternities, and nightclubs used the "brown paper bag" principle as a test for entrance. People at these organizations would take a brown paper bag and hold it against a person's skin. If a person was lighter than the bag, they were admitted.[6]
There is, too, a curious color dynamic that 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.[7]
The Brown Paper Bag Test was heavily documented and normalized with historically black fraternities and sororities (especially among sororities) and some historically black social clubs founded before 1960, whose members selected others who resembled themselves, generally those reflecting partial European ancestry.[8][9] Some privileged multi-racial people of color who came from families freed before the American Civil War attempted to distinguish themselves from the mass of freedmen after the war, who appeared to be mostly of African descent and from less privileged families. New York City's infamous Cotton Club required black female entertainers to pass the Brown Paper Bag Test to be hired and perform for its mostly wealthy white male clientele.[10]
It is rumored a few private historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) used color tests as a way to critique candidates for admission.[11] For instance, Audrey Elisa Kerr refers to private colleges such as Howard and Spelman requiring applicants to send personal photos.[12] However, archive pictures of private HBCUs that formerly required personal photos for admission have dark-skinned black students and faculty easily found in respectable numbers.[13][14]
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(Major Colvin’s brown bag speech)
About a year ago at the recommendation of so many intelligent friends, I religiously raced through HBO’s The Wire. The deeper into it I got, the more I realized I wasn’t merely engrossed in another episode-turning TV drama; I was a convert to The Wire’s pedagogy. Much in the same way The Great Gatsby became the quintessential American novel for its depiction of the roaring 1920s in wealthy Long Island, I would argue The Wire is the story of America in our crumbling era. In the very first scene, an unnamed Black man says to Detective McNulty: “This America man,” and The Wire seamlessly creates this parallel of Baltimore as a microcosm for America. As we live in the decay of this once iconic industrial city, we see the American plight: the career-consumed chain of command in the police department, the widespread and violent drug trade, the diminished strength of labor unions, the corrupt political system, the deprived and broken schools, and the lies played out by the media. The bones that once held Baltimore together are broken, and as the police department, politicians, and schools tirelessly work to hold them together, the city only faces more pain.
In the third season, Major Colvin, frustrated with the drug trafficking on the corners of his Western District after one of his patrolmen was shot attempting a street-level rip, decides to take a new, far more controversial approach. Colvin applies the “paper bag” of open alcohol consumption to drugs, and effectively legalizes drugs in specified vacant zones. While the venture may be wholeheartedly flawed and even flat out wrong, that doesn’t mean it isn’t better.
Sometime in the 1950s and 1960s, the vast majority of American city councils, including Baltimore, passed into effect laws that prohibited the consumption of alcohol in public places. Today the codified law of Baltimore city on open containers in public reads: “It is unlawful for any person to drink or consume any alcoholic beverage or to possess in an open container any alcoholic beverage, in or on any public street, avenue, alley, lane, sidewalk, park, building, or ground in this City.”[1] But as Major Colvin points out, the streets, alleys, parks, and corners of his poor city are and always will be the “poor man’s lounge.”[2] “It is where a man wants to be on a hot summer night,” Colvin says. So these men and women of the streets, often times Black in the case of Baltimore, can no longer legally sit and nurse a High Life on the steps of a row house. When the sworn police officers drive by in their patrol cars, it is their duty under oath to stop these people in possession of open containers and write them up for a civic infraction. But if for every time a police officer drove by someone drinking in public they had to stop and take the time to write those tickets, the police officers of that district wouldn’t have time for any other work. While it may seem petty, they were in violation of the law, and what was to be done? The law had its justification: it was an attempt to clean up the city, but in the context of a city as grinding as Baltimore, the law seemed absurd and even infringing on that “lounge of the poor.” It was a civil dilemma that punished the poor people on their public corners and plagued the police department.
Then one day, one corner-sitting veteran cleverly dropped the bottle or can of beer into a crumpled brown bag. It was genius. As David Simon (creator of The Wire) wrote: “There, on the corners of the poorest neighborhoods, dozens of men would live their lives at the lip of a bottle of 20/20 or T-Bird or Mickey’s, public consumption law or no,” but that wrinkled, decrepit brown bag became a “staple of ghetto diplomacy.”[3] Just the simple fact that the container of alcohol was now hidden allowed both sides, cops and corner folk, to go their separate ways. The bag itself was moot, but it represented a civic compromise. The corner folk could sit in peace in their sanctified public clubhouse, while the police could go on and choose not to interrogate the obvious contents of the bag. Sure in a place where open containers of alcohol pose one of the greatest problems in a quiet community, the police ought to take action, but in Baltimore, and other cities alike, that brown bag spared the police department from writing up every poor drunk that can’t afford to sit at a bar top. By doing so, the police could save their time, toil, and service for the assaults, robberies, rapes, and murders—which in a city like Baltimore is the kind of police work that is actually beneficial to the city.
The brown bag was a compromise, but now it can be a metaphor. Baltimore, the symbolic American city, is broken. The system from the politics, to the police department, to the schools is drowned with corruptive bribery and stat games to dupe the next guy into thinking we can actually fix that city. So one might ask, how do we fix Baltimore, and altogether America? Let’s start by asking what else needs a brown bag, so we can get on doing the work that actually matters.
Some months back I read an article reporting on San Francisco politician Bevan Dufty’s proposal for the city to adopt a homeless plan that implemented a few wet shelters, ending the ban on alcohol in the public shelters. The idea obviously has its flaws; why would we open our shelters to drunks, allow them to keep drinking, and effectively transform the shelters into supervised bars? Further, chronic inebriates aren’t the kind of homeless that drives a lot of sympathy. But is it really better or even remotely helping them to bar them out and leave them on the street? They don’t want to be on the streets, and neighborhoods don’t want them there either.
Whether it is drugs, prostitution, or homeless shelters, we have to get real. It’s not that we should legalize prostitution; rather, we should acknowledge it’s never going to go away, and we need to find the best way to limit the damage. This is the intention of the brown bag, and surely it is corrupt, but aren’t we already fighting corruption? When a bone is already broken, sometimes you have to break it back into place.
[1] Baltimore City Charter & Codes 2013
[2] The Wire Season 3 Episode 2
[3] Simon, David, The Corner, Broadway, accessed March 14, 2013, http://noputhyfooting.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/the-paper-bag-solution/.
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