Abstract
I am using the theories of the brown paper bag test as a vehicle to show how colorism has affected the lives of African-American women from slavery to present day. The brown paper bag test is a test that was employed by African-Americans by laying a brown bag against a person’s face or arm. Only individuals with a skin color lighter or the same color as a brown paper bag were seen as beautiful or allowed to have certain privileges. Through portrait drawing and installations, this work will deliver an in-depth visual narrative of the pervasive way African-American women of different skin color hues have unique experiences based on their skin tone, facial features, hair texture and style. While the brown paper bag test may not be used any longer, the attitudes it exposed and the exclusionary nature of color biases, and other forms of intragroup prejudice are still prevalent within African American culture today.
I specifically selected to concentrate on African-American women, even though colorism is not exclusive to women or African-Americans. In researching colorism, I found that Black women tend to suffer more psychological effects of colorism than their male counterparts. This is imputable to the power structure of skin color within the Black community and the way it influences how African-American women prefer to live and represent themselves to others. This work will provide understanding for those unaware of this multifaceted phenomenon that affects women in the African-American community, building a complex dialog concerning how we perceive those with darker skin hues and why we all buy into the notion of beauty and stereotypes when it comes to race and color in America.
Introduction
Ten women stood in formation from shortest to tallest in a small dusty poor lit room. “Oh, she is pretty,” “look at how long her hair is,” “she’s got good hair,” “she looks like a white girl,” is the whispers that can be overheard in the room full of impeccably dressed, well-educated and professional black women. A tall, light skin Black woman comes forward and says, “All of you aren’t going to get in or make the cut, and tonight we are going to see if any of you have what it takes to be one of us.” Being one of us is why these women are here, it is also the secret entrance into the world of black high society and privilege. “So you think you have what it takes?” Asked another woman who came forward with a light copper skin tone and a stern look, as she laid a brown paper bag to one of the ten women’s face. “Your darker than we thought, too dark, your dismissed”, she stated. Nine women now stood to come to the realization that a brown paper bag will not only determine their fate tonight but for the rest of their lives. This story may seem ridiculous, but it is an instance of how colorism and the brown paper bag test has been used among African-Americans to ascertain if a Black person’s skin tone was sufficiently light or just enough to gain admission or acceptance.
The topic of colorism is extremely controversial and is seldom talked about openly in the African-American community, and when and if it’s discussed, it’s more likely to take place informally or behind closed doors. Colorism is a subcategory of racism and has been described as discrimination based on the degree of lightness in the color of a person’s skin. [1] Colorism is also described as an internalized form of racism which involves prejudice, stereotyping, and perceptions of beauty among members of the same ethnic or racial group. [2] Author Marita Golden characterizes colorism as “the most unacknowledged and unaddressed mental health crisis in communities of color around the world.” [3]
While colorism and skin tone bias affect both African-American men and women, research has shown that these biases led to greater harm to women. This is specifically due to the role skin complexion plays within the African-American community and the effects it has on Black women in the areas of beauty standards and societal positions. Consequently, due to this, African-American women have learned to place emphasis and value on skin tones of women within their own race. [4] This has developed two skin color divisions that are strictly between light and dark skinned African-American women, and their associations with positive and negative stereotypes with each skin color group. Even though the two divisions have received their share of discrimination about their physical appearance, the interactions between light and dark skinned African-American women have changed dramatically throughout the centuries. These changes stem from the conditions that African women faced before they were driven into slavery, which intensified once the Trans-Atlantic slave trade started 1619 [5].
Nevertheless, before the slave trade began, the notion of what we recognize now as colorism had already influenced the continent of Africa and its perception of color. This is imputable to the many parts of Africa where skin tone was used not only to identify a person’s appearance but also their social status. Africans with lighter skin were symbols of beauty, prestige, and wealth. These lighter Africans did not perform manual labor or work in the field under the sun like their darker counterparts, who lived in poverty. The ideology of dark skinned Africans being inferior to light skinned Africans had already been rooted into the minds before they were enslaved and brought to America. [6]
Once in America, colorism escalated severely due to the mixing of races. During this time, European slave masters would engage in forcible sexual activities with African women slaves, which contributed to the founding of a lighter skin slave that bear European features and different textured hair. These lighter slaves, called “mulattoes” or “house slaves” were treated better than the darker slaves and granted certain privileges. [7] These privileges that were allotted, mostly to women, allowed them to live and work in the slave master’s home, and in some cases, were taught to read, write and speak proper English. [8] Nevertheless, the darker slaves or “field slaves” received the reciprocal of their lighter skinned counterparts and were made to live and work outdoors in the plantation fields. However, tension among dark and light skinned women slaves started to show, as slave masters begin to favor and praise lighter women slaves on their physical appearance, and criticize and belittle darker women slaves for the lack thereof. Darker women slaves would even meet more severe penalties than the lighter women slaves when they didn’t live up to the demands and desires of their slave masters. Frantz Fanon, a French psychologist and theorist of colonialism and Third World liberation, wrote that, “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been lodged in his bones against his own people.” [9] Fanon believed that members of an oppressed group will often internalize the attitudes and activities of their oppressors and then direct that aggression at each other. Hence, these factors led to the beginning of the deterioration of identity and sisterhood among the slave women.
Furthermore, once slavery was emancipated in the U.S. in 1863, colorism didn’t disappear. [10] Colorism slowly trickled its way into society, leaving an eternal sense of insecurity that existed on both ends of the light and dark skinned color spectrum. Skin complexion hierarchy began to dominate Black America, those with lighter skin received opportunities off limits to darker skinned African-Americans. Eventually, lighter skin and privilege were considered one in the same in the black community, with lighter skin being the lone criterion for beauty and acceptance into the upper crust black society. This elite order of Black aristocracy wanted to preserve their exclusive group and social circle to those with light skin and high social standings. Class, skin color and social stratification became the norm among Blacks in America, which gave way to the administration of a test. This test, called the brown paper bag test, was employed to determine if fellow African-Americans were light or white enough to be included in these privileged social circles. [11]
Consequently, this bias way of thinking, color excluding, and lies about black inferiority has been pass down from generation to generation and still exist today in the African-American community. This work explores the impact colorism and the brown paper bag test has had on African-American women throughout the years, and address the fact that these dialogs need to be had alongside conversations about race in America. The work in this exhibition also opens new understandings and discussions about colorism, and how crucial skin color continues to be as a deciding factor of how Black women are perceived and judged by others. The content, history and materials in this body of work shows how the action of remaining silent about colorism does not help to end this color hierarchy, but instead leaves it to continue to live in the next generation. By starting conversations about skin complexions and stereotypes we can begin to identify and deconstruct this notion of colorism in the African-American community.
Artists and Literary Influences
Colorism: Looking Outside the Brown Paper Bag, incorporates my personal experience with colorism that I have found commonplace among many black women. These works employ portrait drawing and installation work to convey the psychological and societal impact colorism continues to have on African-American women and to give the viewer a glimpse of the stereotypical criticism that black women face throughout their lifetime regarding treatment and value based solely on physicality. The materials used in Colorism: Looking Outside the Brown Paper Bag, will utilize brown paper bags, cardboard boxes and wooden panels. These drawing installations deliver an in-depth visual narrative of the daily confrontation black women face due to their skin complexion and hair. While the brown paper bag test may not be used any longer, the attitudes it exposed are still prevalent within African American culture. My drawings will use its practice to reference the exclusionary nature of color biases, and other forms of intragroup prejudice that still exist today.
Instillations
The multimedia artist best known for photography and video installations, Lorna Simpson, have expended a great deal of her career exploring visual identity of African-American women, and the language of black hair and hairstyles. Simpson’s technique of fleshing out the confines of art history with clever investigations of race, class, gender, and provocative politics, makes her one of the most important African-American female artists working today.
Simpson’s work showcases photographs of African-American women with a combination of texts and wording that explores society’s obsessive relationship with race, skin color and gender in America. In many of her works, women are pictured indirectly or behind, initiating the rejection of the necessary interaction associated with visual exchange. This is done to place more emphasis on the social and political implications of African-American women’s hairstyles, skin color and appearance. Through repetitive use of the same portrait combined with graphic text, her “anti-portraits” have a sense of scientific classification, addressing the cultural associations of black bodies. [13]
For example, Simpson’s work entitled Twenty Questions (A Sampler), (1986), where four identical circular black-and-white photographs are displayed showing the back of a dark skinned Black woman’s head and shoulders. These photographs are accompanied by texts questioning the woman’s appearance and character. Even so, you can also view this in Simpson’s work entitled Guarded Condition, (1989), where Polaroid images of a Black woman’s body are fragmented and viewed from behind, while her posture is in a state of caution towards the possibility of aggression that she can expect as a result of her gender and the color of her skin. The nonappearance of the face deceives in both pieces, as the image does not execute as it is supposed to, which is to supply a kind of identification.
However, Like Simpson, the intent for the installation work in this exhibition is to create doubts and queries when seen. In doing this, I encourage the spectator to take part in constructing meaning to what they’re experiencing. The method in this work is to never tell the solid story, but rather, force the viewer to complete it in a manner that pulls attention to their own educated guesses and personal beliefs.
Another artist who utilizes the technique of having the viewer take part in constructing meaning in their work is contemporary artist Kara Walker. Best recognized for her black-and-white cut-paper silhouette installation work that examines history, race, Black identity and violence. Walker’s work is recurring themes of myths and folklore set in the epoch of pre-Civil War in America’s antebellum south, using turn of the century style black caricature illustrations to create a visual story of racial discrimination and slavery through disturbing and troubling images. Walker is deemed as one of the most controversial and talented artists of her generation.
The distressing critique of the slaves, plantation owners and southern belles in Walker’s work produces tension between what the spectator already knows, and the imagery of the intense and surreal violence of American history. Her installation work feeds off the viewer’s expectations and encourages them to confront what lies underneath the surface of their own personal narratives and fantasies about sex, power and race. Nevertheless, what Walker’s silhouette work is about is bridging the uncompleted beliefs, mythologies and folklore of southern slave life, and raising identity and gender issues for African American women today.
Despite the oftentimes grim subject matter in her work, Walker relies on the viewer’s interaction to catapult her work even further into the viewer’s mind. “I didn’t want a completely passive viewer,” she has said. “I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he/she would either giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful.” [14]
Similarly, the work in this exhibition will act the same in getting the viewers to interact with the installation by using Walker’s method of not permitting the viewer to distinguish between ethnicity based on skin tone, but employing racial variations that can simply be identified through the viewers own judgement and biases of stereotypical facial features and hair styles of African-American women. The drawing installations show how the work serves as a withering review of how color discrimination and the brown paper bag test affects us all, black as well as white, and how we continue to be complicit in ethnic stereotyping today.
Walker was influenced by another African-American female artist name Adrian Piper, who is a philosopher as well as a conceptual artist, and another influence for the work in this exhibition. Through her performances and installation work, Piper confrontationally examines American cultural biases and the impact it has on people. The explorations of race and conflict have made Piper a vital influence on generations of artists investigating race and the construction of identity. Her technique of confronting the viewer directly, leaves them to query their own race, skin color and identity, while implicating everyone as part of both the problem and the solution concerning race in America.
An example of this can be shown in Piper’s video installation called Cornered, (1988). The video shows Piper explaining the difficulty of being misidentified as white by others in social situations where she has been subject to racist remarks due to her lighter skin tone. She explains why she should not have to “pass” for white, and why black identity extends beyond visibility in the public sphere. [15] However, like Piper’s work, the work in this show explores my own and other Black women’s personal struggles with identity. This installation work will specifically speak to people’s assumptions and racial stereotypes about Black women, skin tones: light skin vs. dark skin, and the behaviors towards them.
Drawings
Barbra Walker is an expressive figurative drawing and painting artist, that is known for her large-scale drawings that are often completed directly onto walls. Walker’s work mainly explores themes of history recording and social interaction documentation. Her works are inspired from the perspective of her and her family’s experience of growing up as an Afro-Caribbean in the UK and the reaction of those around them.[16] Walker considers her work to be social documentary that consciously aims to challenge what she sees as the misunderstandings and stereotypes that abound about the African-Caribbean community in Britain [17]
With any art dealing with social documentation there is a political motivation for it, but also of importance is Walker’s original and matter-of-fact connection to how she produces her drawings and paintings. She states, “a lot of my work looks at things that are happening in today’s society. There are historical references in my work but I am looking at what is happening today. These works are about race, stereotyping, identity, and racial profiling.” [18] Just as Walker uses figurative and portraiture drawings in her work to document and record past and present history and social issues, the drawings in this exhibition does the same to document the folk lore and myths of the brown paper bag test, and the stereotypes and misunderstandings about African-American women with light and dark skin tones.
Firelei Báez is another artist that uses her own personal narrative and experiences in her artwork. Báez, an artist born in the Dominican Republic, who relocated with her family to America at age 10, says in the Dominican Republic racial identity was much more complicated. “However, in the United States, those shades of gray were suddenly gone. There’s a fluidity of color, of race, in the Caribbean,” she states. “But in America, you’re just black.”[19]
Báez’s elaborate and complex works on paper and canvas with paint, patterns and figures, as well as sculptures that interweaves matters of identity, femininity, ancestry, and the history of racism and discrimination of women of color.
“I started incorporating the figure into my work as a way to navigate my own sense of identity, particularly because I came from a place that didn’t fit into one specific narrative. It was a way for me to untangle what I was going through on a daily basis.” [20]
Most notably is her series of work on social stratification based on phenotypes called, Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test, (2010-12). [21] Similarly, Báez’s “Can I Pass?” series shares the same concept of this exhibition with the reference use of the brown paper bag test. However, Báez’s series not only uses the brown paper bag test but also the “fan test,” which is another unscientific test used to determine African heritage. Unlike the brown paper bag test, the fan test measures the coarseness of one’s hair based on whether it flows straight back from a fan’s breeze. [22] This specific series of Báez’s work has influenced the portrait and the black hair drawings and illustrations of the different variances in the skin tone, facial features and hair texture of the Black women drawn on the brown paper bags, wooden panels and the cardboard boxes in this exhibition.
The Paper Bag Principle
The book, The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C., by author Audrey Elisa Kerr, was used as a template and guide for the research in this exhibition. Kerr’s writing explores and investigates the history of colorism and the practices and myths of the brown paper bag test in Washington, D.C.’s black communities during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book looks at the separation between the black elites and what Kerr calls, “regular black folks,” and how the proximity to white skin tone and wealth have helped produce two different black Washingtons. Kerr states, “Historically, looking white was a difference of working or not working. Proximity to whiteness equaled proximity to power. I think it was less about a demonization of darkness as it was a sort of aspiration toward lightness, which equaled access and power.” [23] Kerr talks about in the book on how various times in history, the black community in Washington, D.C. often replicated the act of Jim Crow. The book discusses how after slavery ended, light-skinned blacks established social organizations that barred darker ex-slaves, which continued into the early 20th century where most, if not all elite black society were fair-skinned and passed for white.
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. [24] Nevertheless, the work in this exhibition has similar objectives: to give a visual record of the different practices of complexion folklore related to colorism; to show the impact that these different practices had and continue to have on the development of black women’s consciousness; and to show the power that skin color and racial bias hold within the black community today.
Conceptual Influences
Social Dominance Theory on Legitimizing Myths
Social dominance theory was developed by psychology professors Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto. This theory was created to explain the origin and outcome of social power structures and oppression. In this research, the theory of legitimizing myth is used to serve the role of hierarchy of skin color in the African-American community. Social dominance theory of legitimizing myths, suggests that biases, preconceptions and stereotyping legitimizes and maintains the existing social hierarchy.
The research and work in this exhibition referenced the Social Dominance Theory as a framework for understanding colorism, the brown paper bag test, and the attitudes among dark and light skinned African-American women and their given stereotypes. However, according to Social Dominance Theory and colorism among Black women, lighter skin women are believed to be higher on the Social Dominance Orientation scale than darker skin women because of their close proximity to whiteness and their European ancestry.
The Social Dominance Orientation scale is a measurement of individual differences in levels of intergroup based discrimination, [25] An example of this, is the belief that light skinned women get a pass over dark skinned women in terms of beauty, work and overall perception due to their skin color. They are also deemed more attractive, more successful and smarter than darker skinned women. [26]. These myths and beliefs about skin color have existed for many centuries, going back to slavery, when European slave-owners would give preferential treatment to slaves with fairer complexions. The preferential treatment carried on from generation to generation and served as the root to the division among black women. Simultaneously, there was resentment for this preferential treatment and the desire to acquire and benefit from it.
“the longer an organization exists, the more its efforts will wander away from its original social purpose and toward the preservation of the organization itself.” [27].
Consequently, lighter skin color came to be viewed as an asset for survival and power among the slaves, and this way of thinking can be witness even today in the African-American community. The stereotypes and other ideologies that Black women have inherited from slavery, makes them give into or act in ways that reinforce these stereotypes, thus becoming their own self-fulfilling prophecies.
“ideology functions to justify and support hierarchical group relations and that ruling elites largely control the contents and framing of social discourse. Because of this control of social ideology, ruling elites are able to convince not only themselves but, more importantly, their subordinates of the legitimacy of their rule.” [27].
Furthermore, through the influences on the activities of both light and dark skinned women, color hierarchy enhances the theory of legitimizing myths that contribute to the preservation of intergroup power structures. Thus, expressing stereotypes that light skinned Black women are more attractive, successful, and privileged effectively keeps lighter Black women at the top, whereas stereotypes of dark skinned women as unattractive, angry and aggressive, functionally keeps them at the bottom.
“Systems of group-based social hierarchy are not maintained simply by the oppressive activities of dominants or the passive compliance of subordinates, but rather by the coordinated and collaborative activities of both dominants and subordinates.” [27].
Thus, social hierarchies based on nationality, faith, class, gender, education, race, and color have existed for millenniums. This work in this exhibition attempts a less formal approach to exploring the political orientations of the brown paper bag test and gets to the root of colorism among Black women.
The looking-glass self theory
Another important element to the research of colorism in this body of work is Charles Cooley’s social psychological theory of the looking-glass self. The theory of the looking glass self explains how an individual cultivates his or her identity in response to how he or she thinks others’ see them. Therefore, individuals form their own self-image as the reflections of the response and evaluations of others in their surroundings and/or environment. An example of this would be, if a woman believes that her friends and love ones look at her and sees her as too dark and unattractive, she is likely to project that self-image, regardless of whether this has any truth to it. Cooley’s theory is critical in understanding how colorism affects the psyche and development of African-American women. Still, it’s the communication from others that Black women experience about their skin complexion that results in how they view themselves.
“As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.” [28]
The theory is that people in our close circles and surroundings serve as the “mirrors” that reflect images of ourselves. According to Cooley, this process has three elements:
“A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” [28]
Similar to a reflection in a mirror, the looking glass self theory states that people see what others think about them. In the same mode, that darker skin Black women are influenced by the negative messages about their appearance they get from society and the media. Women of darker complexions that experience low self-image and esteem is only seeing what her society mirrors back at her. These negative biases and judgements are brought up by the upholding of white beauty standards, and the continuation of colorism and racial discrimination.
Nevertheless, when an individual builds their self-image it is unconsciously done. People are not intentionally aware of how often the desire to conform to the image we think people expect from us. Therefore, if a person creates an undesirable image of one’s self, the self-esteem will be low. People with a lower sense of self and poor self-esteem has often been linked with psychological problems, and these individuals depend heavily on the social world to build their self-image. Furthermore, it is important that self-image is developed based on a person’s own assessments rather than the believe of others.
The looking-glass self theory is employed in this exhibition to contribute insight into complexion folklores and/or beliefs held about dark skin color and skin color hierarchy among African-American women today, and the ideologies that were represented by the infamous brown paper bag test. This consistency of work will prove how the origin of Black women’s identity and perception of themselves has been formed by skin tone and if Black women are interacting with each other, they will be vulnerable to changing their own self-image, a process that will extend throughout their lifetimes.
Exhibition Analysis
Colorism: Looking Outside the Brown Paper Bag is an exhibition comprised of a series of portrait drawing and text installations on wooden panels, cardboard boxes and brown paper bags. The debut of the exhibition on March 31, 2018 will be held in the Kipp Gallery at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
The viewer is confronted with the psychological and societal stigmas associated with skin color and hair texture among African-American women. The installation work in this exhibition will provide an understanding about colorism for those unaware of the multifaceted phenomenon that affects women in the African-American community. The combination of wall and floor installation work will break up the space to give the viewer a chance to engage with the portraits and text that will build up hard conversations and dialogs concerning race, skin color, and stereotypes about Black women in America today. The intent of this exhibition is to encourage people to question how we perceive women with darker skin hues and why we all buy into the notion of beauty and stereotypes.
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