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Reviews
| The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. By Audrey Elisa Kerr. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. xx + 145 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.00 (cloth).
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In The Paper Bag Principle, Audrey Elisa Kerr wrestles with what she admits is a taboo subject: the folklore of intraracial discrimination. Color prejudice within the African American community is a sensitive subject, yet, as Kerr demonstrates, alleged systems and methods of discrimination employed by churches, schools, and elite social clubs have been the fodder of gossip and rumor since the early nineteenth century. Since mere casual observation of institutional membership often reveals an apparent preference for those African Americans with light skin, straight hair, and European features, observers may presume an empirical test for membership: a pencil through the hair to check for smoothness; a flashlight to cast the shadow of a profile; or a simple examination to search for visible blue veins or color in the cuticle of the fingernail, all tests that have their origin in the efforts of white institutions to police the color line. Nearly ubiquitous among the testimony and speculation is what Kerr refers to as "the paper bag principle," the rumored practice that serves as the focus of her inquiry into African American folkloric practices. According to the testimony Kerr has collected, the guardians of the gates to social institutions and informal gatherings sometimes maintained color boundaries by attaching a paper bag to the doorway or holding a paper bag up to the face of the aspiring entrant. Anyone with skin darker than the bag was not allowed to enter or join. |
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Confirmation of the rumors has proved difficult, and much to her credit, Kerr focuses instead on the function of the rumors in the African American community in Washington, D.C., largely limiting herself to the popular perception of the major institutions of high society, among them the Lotus Club, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Howard University, and the historic Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, which one informant identified as the "paper bag church" (p. 110). The rumors follow a familiar script: long ago, a friend, relative, or acquaintance was subjected to the test by a club or institution that has since abandoned the practice. Predictably, the informant is rarely the victim of the discrimination. Kerr's book explores uses of evidence that not everyone would consider reliable—"rumors" or myth-oral traditions—which she argues has basis in fact. Some of these organizations, if not all, once participated in color ranking and discrimination. Yet, even unsubstantiated, the rumors themselves produce a powerful reality. Folklore, Kerr explains, "serves ... to confirm the existence of systems of social power" (p. 36), and the rumors of paper bag tests used by powerful social institutions in the African American community express a warning against the self-hatred of intraracial color discrimination that the community associates with systems of power in the United States. |
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Even with the slightness of the volume at just over one hundred pages of text, The Paper Bag Principle is still an important if small contribution to the study of the folklore of colorism and the impact of rumor on the African American community, an "addendum," as Kerr admits of her work, "to the rich body of work being done on the black elite, the city of Washington, and color consciousness, as well as work done in African American folklife and folk traditions" (p. 114). The testimonies—the rumors, the gossip, the innuendos—that she has collected from a variety of informants illuminates more official histories of the times and place. It is in this collection of voices, this hitherto undocumented history through rumor, that Kerr's book finds its greatest success.
Charles D. Martin
University of Central Missouri
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