New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the social practice of exclusion based on skin color within the black community, highlighting colorism as a divisive factor.
Michael Eric Dyson's quote addresses a troubling aspect of social dynamics within the black community, where the 'brown paper bag party' serves as a metaphor for how individuals are judged and sometimes excluded based on the shade of their skin. This practice not only reflects internalized racism but also establishes a hierarchy that undermines unity and acceptance among individuals of the same race, emphasizing the need to confront and dismantle such prejudices.
In practice
In a discussion about colorism during a panel on racial equality, one might quote this to underline the issue.
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever.
My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.
When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.
I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
George Bush ran a campaign where he bragged about being an anti-intellectual, dismissing his Harvard and Yale pedigree, pretending he was an American every day, ordinary everyman, and as a result of that, played up his fumbling speech because it signified that he was a good guy. That is deeply and profoundly anti-intellectual.
The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.
It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.
By mutual respect, understanding and with good will we can find acceptable solutions to any problems which exist or may arise between us.
When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.
The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.
My great hope for us as young women is to start being kinder to ourselves so that we can be kinder to each other. To stop shaming ourselves and other people for things we don't know the full story on - whether someone is too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, too loud, too quiet, too anything. There's a sense that we're all ‘too’ something, and we're all not enough.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.