Brown Paper Bag Test
Brown Paper Bag Test Artist explores the politics of race identity and skin shade By DAVID MADDOX for Nashville Scene June 08, 2006 F rantz Fanon, the French psychologist and theorist of colonialism and Third World liberation, observed that members of an oppressed group will frequently internalize the attitudes of their oppressors and then direct that aggression at each other: “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people.” The phenomenon shows itself in America’s internal corollary to colonialism, the long generations of slavery, and Jim Crow laws, when African Americans accorded higher social status to people with a lighter complexion. The brown paper bag test was a ritual once used by black sororities and fraternities and other social organizations to determine social ordering based on skin color: anyone whose skin was darker than a brown paper bag was ineligible to join. Frantz Fanon, the French psycholo