This is a very touchy subject and some people are going to deny that self-hatred exists within a race. But, you know what? It does. How else would you describe the way Black people sometimes view each other? Before you answer this question, let me tell you why I brought this up. Last week, I watched the Tyra Banks show and it was a show filled with clips of some of her shows that dealt with race-related topics. In every one of those clips, she had Black people on her show who were saying discriminating and degrading things about Black people, as a whole. You talk about stereotypes! Black people are the worst at stereotyping their own! One of the topics that the Black people on her show were extremely stereotypical about was the different shades of skin tones that Black people have.
It is a well known fact that within the Black community that lighter skinned Blacks are, more times than not, treated differently than darker skinned Blacks. In fact, in the Black community, there used to be something called the Brown Paper Bag test. According to Urban Dictionary, in the early 1900s, the Brown Paper Bag test was commonly used “among upper class Black American societies and families to determine if a Black person was sufficiently white to gain admittance or acceptance. If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag, you did not merit inclusion. Thousands of Black institutions including the nation’s most eminent Black fraternity – Alpha Phi Alpha, Howard University, and numerous church and civic groups all practiced this discrimination.” Rivea Ruff of BlackCollegeView.com states it best when she says, “Though the brown paper bag test is antiquated and frowned upon as a shameful moment in African-American history, the ideals behind the practice still lingers in the African-American community.” How true (and unfortunate) this is and below is a perfect example of it still happening within the Black community.
In October of 2007, a Detroit, Michigan DJ came up with, what he considered to be a brilliant promotional plan for a party at a nightclub. He planned to allow light-skinned Black women into the club for free, which meant if you were thought to be a dark-skinned Black woman or somewhere in between dark-skinned and light-skinned, you would have to pay to enter the same party! Now, this DJ, who described himself as a dark-skinned Black man, says he was not trying to offend anyone — it was just a promotional thing. He was going to promote another night for Sexy Chocolate dark-skinned Black women as well as Sexy Caramel (which, I guess, was for Black women who had a skin tone that wasn’t light-skinned or dark-skinned). Amazing, huh? Of course, this party never got off the ground because once his promotional idea was broadcasted all over the Internet and by word of mouth, he received all sorts of angry emails and phone calls berating him for his actions. Do you see why this can be perceived as self-hatred? No? Think about this: according to Black Commentator, “history has shown that Black people with lighter skin were treated better. In the days of slavery, the dark-skinned Blacks worked in the fields while light-skinned Blacks worked in the house, hence the terms “field Negroes” and “house Negroes.” It got so bad, that not only did the slave owners, who were often responsible for the lighter shade of brown his slaves had, give lighter-skinned Blacks more respect, but so did the dark-skinned Blacks.”
This self-hatred mentality began during slavery and unfortunately continues to this day. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Black people make derogatory references about the shade of another Black person’s skin tone. What other race does this? Or for that matter, what other race uses a derogatory and degrading term to describe itself? Yep, I’m talking about the use of the N word amongst Black people. The question I have is how does the Black community overcome this? Or is it even possible to overcome seeing as how it is so deeply ingrained into the Black community? I am very interested in hearing your comments to this topic.
