This is a promo video for a longer documentary about colorism.  Although I did not watch it, I think this video gives a good idea of what exactly colorism is and how far and deep it runs.  I did not know that it went back to slave days.  The slave owners would favor lighter slaves and give them more privileges than darker slaves.  They thought they were more white, so close enough to be nicer to them.  This ridiculous idea has lasted all these years into today.  I suppose if you backtrack to the slave days, directly after they were liberated, people still judged them and thought that the lighter newly non-slave people looked more like them, the might have figured they had more of a chance becoming more like regular white citizens versus the really dark people.  This theory had then been passed down generation to generation all the way into today.  Dark people are more easily associated with gangs and general criminals, while lighter people, even like Soledad O'Brien in this video, are more easily recognized as close-to-white-non-gang-like people.  Hopefully someday this can change, but for now, lighter is still better.  

   
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These two pictures really speak to colorism. The first picture is of Beyonce.  The picture on the left is about how she really looks, and the picture on the right is a publicity shot.  The magazine shot is obviously a lot lighter.  Along with touching up photos of celebrities and making them look younger, they also sometimes lighten them.  I don't really see the purpose of this, only because they think that society wants to see lighter dark skinned people.  On the other hand, the second picture of OJ Simpson taken at the time of his trial.  For his picture, they darkened his skin. This was a huge controversy at the time. This goes with what I have been reading about.  Light is good. Darker is worse. So they darkened his skin.  They wanted to make him look darker and meaner and more of a monster.  They thought that darker dark skinned people are worse than lighter people.  He didn't pass the brown paper bag test, that's for sure.  I think that was the deal. Either way, lightening or darkening skin for publicity is ridiculous.

As I was reading through articles trying to find one for this blog, I came across a few sentences talking about a "brown paper bag test".  I wondered what that was about, and ended up finding an interesting article about it.  This article asks how would we feel if we could only associate with people who were the same color or lighter than a brown paper bag.  This idea was used dating back to the slave days and soon after they were freed.  People gradually were accepting black slaves as people, but only light dark-skinned people.  They would judge people and only accept people if they were dark, but light enough.  Many people think this judging idea still exists today.

This seems to sound ridiculous to non-judgmental people like us, but it's a big deal to some.   For blacks in the early 1900s, as if being of a different race and culture wasn't difficult enough, if they were a few shades darker than what was "acceptable" they would still be shunned, by people of the opposite race and of their own. There are all sorts of statistics of how darker black people are not as successful as lighter black people because some people still don't find it as "appealing".  To be so specific and to compare them to a brown bag really shocked me. I can't imagine looking at someone and thinking "oh, you're a tad too dark for me to talk to you".  That's just ridiculous.


http://www.thehilltoponline.com/news/the-legacy-of-the-brown-paper-bag-1.466574#.UQrdKR1baSo

When Mrs. Wren was talking about colorism, I thought it sounded interesting.  I had never heard of it and find it kind of odd that there would be racism within racism.  I want to learn more about it and see what this is all about!