Brown paper bag test

I always wondered how light and dark skinned blacks perceived each other....

The paper bag test
By BILL MAXWELL, Times Staff Writer
St. Petersburg Times

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

My Friday afternoon confession...

I feel so embarrassed...

About a month ago whilst channel surfing I came across 'Sinndoor' - a Hindi drama serial which shows nightly on ATN Zee. It's full of over-the-top melodramatics, family politics, wailing mother-in-laws, errant sons and victimized daughter in laws.

...now I'm hooked. I need my daily fix of drama. Life completely stops for me as I eagerly watch each roller coaster episode. Till now, the only people I thought who avidly watched Hindi drama serials were lobotomized retards....

Review: The Kite Runner

Just finished 'The Kite Runner' recently. I kept seeing the book in the bookshops and I was for a long time reluctant to read/purchase it because a) it was set in Afghanistan (not exactly the most progressive of societies) and b) dealt with Muslim Pashtun/non-Punjabi characters and I felt I might not be able to relate to the story. But on both counts I'm glad I was proved wrong (it took somebody on another site to persuade me to read it).

Khaled Hosseini's style of writing is beautifully simple and direct, and his portrayal of friendship, love and loss against the background of war-torn Afghan social life is illuminating.
Reading this book has helped me see friendships and the fragility of life in a completely different filter.

I wish the novel would go on and on.....

My Yashica T4

Last week I discovered my trusty Yashica T4 camera lying behind some books on a shelf. Finding that was like being re-united with an old friend. Looking at the elegant design of the body I slid the power switch and the lens motor effortlessly came to life, and all the self-check lights reassuringly blinked ready for action.

I purchased my T4 about 10 years ago from a speciality photo retail store in Gloucester, England. I've lost count of the rolls of film I shot on the T4, capturing many memories of days gone by. I took it all over the place, from Milton Keynes to Paris, Barcelona, Toronto, Ludhiana and back. The Carl Zeiss lens (one of the best on the market) never once failed me, and took pictures comparable in quality and detail to SLRs. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the T4, it is a point and shoot camera regarded by many photo/camera websites as one of the best ever manufactured. My current digital camera (Olympus Stylus 410) comes nowhere close to the quality of pictures I could get with the T4. Sadly, Yashica ceased production of the T4 about 3 years ago.

Anyway, in the last couple of days I bought several rolls of Fuji film (from 400 ISO to 800 ISO speed) determined once again to make use of this faithful keeper of memories.

White Gold

I just spent my lunch hour lounging on a sofa in a bookshop, being totally mesmerized by 'White Gold' - an historical account of white slavery on the north African coast in the 18th century. Some of the accounts of cruelty and religious persecution are truly sickening. I'll be back tomorrow to finish the rest of the book....



*****************************
In the meantime, here's a review of 'White Gold' I found on the net:

From the bestselling author of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg comes White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves. Giles Milton’s latest book is a valuable work simply because the story of slavery belongs to us all. Furthermore, this spine-tingler is also important in that it has managed to find a publisher, and therefore an audience. (In Europe, some politically sensitive history books don’t always see the light of day.)

Much is written about the slave trade, but rarely does one read a book about the likes of Thomas Pellow. Barbary corsairs captured the Cornish cabin boy and his shipmates in 1716. Sadly, such kidnappings were commonplace. Between the years 1550-1730, Algiers alone was home to around 25,000 European slaves. At times, there were around 50,000 captives. Slave markets also flourished in Tunis and Morocco where little Thomas was sent. The lad was only 11 years old.

There are many ways to read White Gold. I’ve long tried, albeit clumsily, to put my empathy cap on and think about how it would feel to struggle as a slave. This book was a great help and worked a treat. Mile’s vivid descriptions backed with thorough research make the task easier. When Thomas Pellow was entering a life of servitude, my heart sunk into my boots. Miles describes the scene:

"As the sun rose spectacularly over the city’s eastern ramparts and the men were led through the principal gate, they were tormented by jeering, hostile Moors. “We were met and surrounded by vast crowds of them,” wrote Pellow, “offering us the most vile insults.” As word of their arrival spread through the souks, more and more people flocked to the city in order to mock the hated Christians. They surged towards the frightened captives and tried to beat them with sticks and batons."

Readers will be tempted to ask, “Were Pellow’s capturers tyrannical and bloodthirsty barbarians?” The politically incorrect answer to that is, “Yes”.

Whatever you do, don’t read this book before meal times. Milton, unlike some historians, doesn’t shy away from awful truths. The book’s most disturbing figure is Moulay Ismail, the sultan of Morocco. It is he who buys the young Thomas and routinely executes people whom rub him up the wrong way. Not content with hijacking ships, the Islamic slave traders would make “home visits” to Europe’s coastal villages and kidnap family members. So popular was the demand for Christian slave labour that some rich Barbary pirates, funded by even richer Sultans, pillaged Reykjavik and returned with 400 very frightened Icelanders. Distance was obviously no barrier. Later, travelling Americans also became sitting ducks. Does this sound uncomfortably familiar?

Like some Islamic extremists of today, the Sultans laughed about holding Europe to ransom. They were rarely met with force. Obviously, Thomas Pellow’s experience takes place within a wider context, and Giles Milton gives us this. As a learned writer, he provides his audience with sufficient primary resources and solid secondary ones. Of particular interest, are the graphic illustrations of torture techniques and photographs of the now crumbling Meknes palace built by Christian slaves. This is not for the faint hearted.

Whereas, the tireless work of feisty born-again Christians led to the abolition of slavery in America, this was not the case in North Africa and other Islamic strongholds. Ironically, years after Pellow’s death, a descendant of his took to the seas to fight against the barbaric slave masters. Without revealing too much, the book’s amazing epilogue reads like a tribute to the actions over words principle.

Giles Milton’s White Gold is a treasure, and we owe it to North Africa’s one million European white slaves to never forget. They were a stolen generation. But this book is not just about victims. Many brave English souls who advocated for the abolition of black slavery turned their attention to the plight of European captives. Groups like the Society of Knights Liberators of the White Slaves of Africa (pdf file 684KB) were instrumental in creating awareness. So too were some Church of England churches. Yet, after marathon “talkfests” with barbarian traders, the abolitionists only made significant gains after adopting hawkish strategies. Arguably, this lesson has been lost to some of us.

As a wise man once said, “If you want peace, prepare for war”. And, if you want a good read, consider getting your hands on a copy of White Gold.

Times are changing...

I had to do a double take when I read the article on the BBC....