“This is, to my knowledge, the first full-length treatment of complexion legends and myths, filling a major gap in the literature. . . . It treats controversial issues with great sensitivity and insight.”
—Nancy Bonvillain, Simon’s Rock College of Bard
The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”
While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.
Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization.
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.
Other titles of interest:
Maxine Smith’s Unwilling Pupils: Lessons Learned in Memphis’s Civil Rights Classroom (forthcoming March 2007)
Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (forthcoming June 2007)
Inventing Black Women (forthcoming July 2007)
Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle against White Supremacy (forthcoming July 2007)
George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative
Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam
Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers
The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee
The Letters of Jean Toomer
Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman
|
The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. Add to Cart |