In 20th-century America, the brown paper bag test was used to deny some Black people access to positions of privilege if their skin tone was darker than a paper bag.
The brown paper bag test was a form of discrimination used to exclude dark-skinned Black people by comparing their skin tone to the color of a brown paper bag. Those who were lighter than the bag were allowed into the club. Those whose skin failed the test were rejected.
There are stories of Black fraternities and sororities, professional organizations, and even churches using the test to determine membership. The gangster owner of Harlem’s Cotton Club, which catered to white audiences, was said to use the test to restrict who could join his dance troupe, sometimes known as the Copper Colored Gals.
In New Orleans, where generations of racial mixing between white Europeans, enslaved Black people, and Indigenous Americans had created a unique caste structure based on skin tone, there is still reputable lore surrounding “bag parties.”
And while the ideas behind the brown paper bag test originated in the earliest days of slavery, it led to a long discriminatory tradition of colorism that explicitly privileged light skin over dark well into the 20th century.
What Is The Brown Paper Bag Test?
In 1996, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that, not long after he arrived at Yale as an undergraduate, “some of the brothers who came from private schools in New Orleans held a ‘bag party.'”
It was 1969, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Gates, born in 1950 in West Virginia, had never heard of 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 and anyone darker than it was denied entrance. That was one cultural legacy that would be put to rest in a hurry.”
Gates’s experience of learning about the brown paper bag test was not uncommon. Knowledge spread by word of mouth. It became almost folkloric in its existence as a way to reinforce colorism.
When scholar Audrey Elisa Kerr investigated the tradition in the early 2000s, she uncovered dozens of tales of Louisiana paper bag tests.
A Creole barbershop owner told Kerr that paper bag parties were common in the past. The parties might take several forms. In the most explicit, the hosts would nail a brown paper bag at the door. Anyone darker than the bag could not enter.
The test traces its roots back to the days of slavery. Under the “one drop” rule, anyone with a single drop of African blood was considered Black. In practice, Louisiana’s Black population came in all shades — and skin color often determined social status.
