COLORISM + HISTORY

Why The Brown Paper Bag Test Still Matters

An essay about proximity to whiteness

In New Orleans, you will find Black people of every shade and hue, but few understand the cultural significance of these differences. Many of the city's upper bourgeois belong to secret societies called Krewes, where membership is tightly scrutinized. They are the ones who throw Mardi Gras parades, host grand balls, and often hold positions of power throughout the city. It wasn't until 1992 that New Orleans formally desegregated these organizations, twenty-eight years after the Civil Rights Act became law. Socially, untangling the anti-Black racism deeply entrenched in some Krewes is an ongoing struggle. Historically, some New Orleanians used the Brown Paper Bag Test to determine who could join elite clubs and festivities, codifying a system of not just racial but also color-based discrimination.

According to Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, “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.”

Proximity to whiteness could be measured using a brown paper bag test, a brutal display of the color-based hierarchy deriving from the chattel slavery system. The brown paper bag test perpetuated a core myth of white supremacy that having light skin makes someone more worthy of acceptance. People who couldn’t pass the brown paper bag test would often be turned away simply because those hosting an event considered their skin color to be too dark.

Colorism can also be seen in some of the country's most prominent Black sororities and fraternities. According to Patience Denece Bryant, "words such as nappy, tar baby, jiggaboos, high yellow, and white girl wannabe were used by the ladies to insult each other." While Bryant suggested both dark and light-skinned Black people reported experiencing colorism, she also said research showed "people of color who are light skin often have an advantage in life because their skin color allows them to access more educational, social, and financial opportunities than their darker counterparts."

Discussing race as a binary construct doesn't sufficiently cover the complexities of being Black in America, and certainly not in Louisiana. Those who were passé blanc received privileges often deprived of dark-skinned Black people, a phenomenon referred to as colorism or shadism. According to James Haskins' book, The Creoles of Color of New Orleans, a group of free people of color "enjoyed many rights and immunities" before the signing of the Louisiana Purchase that was in some ways made their lives "indistinguishable from Whites." While Black people in other Southern states couldn't marry, buy property, or provide an inheritance for their children, many free people of color in Louisiana could. Many Creole people were the descendants of French colonials who fled Saint-Domingue after the Haitian slave revolution, freely mixing with African and Indigenous people.

Napoleon Bonaparte insisted creole people be "protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and the religion they profess." However, as with any group of Black people in America, the promise of equality was hollow. "Louisiana-born free people of color began calling themselves Creoles" to protect their status, though some were unsuccessful. According to Haskins, when Louisiana became a state in 1812, White Americans refused to recognize the rights of free people of color.

Creole people benefited from the color line, but some also helped to lead the resistance. For instance, a creole enslaved man named Charles Deslondes led the country’s largest slave revolt near the German coast a year earlier in 1811. There is a street honoring Deslondes in New Orleans. Haskins points out that in 1855, Louisiana passed a law requiring free people of color to have a permit to travel freely throughout the parishes. Such restrictions caused many Creoles to side with Northerners during the Civil War, hoping that ending slavery would improve their conditions.

Take Homère Plessy from the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case, for instance. In 1896, Plessy, a man who was 1/8th Black, challenged the segregation of public streetcars in Louisiana. Of course, Ferguson had some features of a Black man, but he was considered a Creole. The Supreme Court ruled against Plessy and upheld a Louisiana law that legalized racial segregation. Nowadays, people don't often think of someone with one Black grandparent as Black, but during Homère's life, the one-drop rule made him endure the same socially diminished status as darker-skinned Black people. Homère could easily pass the brown paper bag test, but it wasn't enough to make White people accept him or even sit near him on a streetcar.

Despite formal legislation, anti-Black racism and color-based discrimination continued to dictate social life in New Orleans. As Clara Simpson, an uptown woman, said, "Blacks couldn't join their clubs." So, Black people started their organizations, and the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, which started parading in 1901, became one of the most well-known examples. Nowadays, you won’t find New Orleans natives using the brown paper bag test. Such explicit displays of colorism are no longer socially acceptable. Yet, one could argue that such tests are unnecessary because the brown paper bag test helped to normalize colorism in New Orleans — not even the largest storms couldn’t sweep that away.

The brown paper bag test has been ingrained in our society, like etchings on wood. Dark-skinned people are still deprived of opportunities available to passé blanc. As long as we live in a society that shows an explicit preference for White and light-skinned people, the brown paper bag test will still matter because even though we’re not walking around with a brown paper bag in our pockets, the way society treats dark-skinned people reveals the threat that not only racism but also colorism poses.

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