Skin No Darker Than a Brown Paper Bag

Skin No Darker Than a Brown Paper Bag

By Kami Bryant

My mother was a blonde and blue-eyed Caucasian and my father is a black man. That heritage classifies me as mixed or mulatto. My heritage also qualifies me as neither white nor black but both. It also makes it so I don’t quite fit in to one racial box. I typically either mark both boxes white and black or sometimes two or more races. I used to mark the ‘Other’ category when questioned about my race.

At a previous job, management decided to split up the employees by race so that the group could discuss in the meeting/training what it meant to them to be white or to be black. I was upset because was I supposed to go to the black group? My friend and co-worker is white. I wanted to go to her group and be with her in her training. But no, I am a person of color, not white. I don’t belong in the white group with my friend. I went to the black group. I didn’t really belong there either. I wasn’t raised in the community that my co-workers described. I was told that I could go to both groups. That didn’t sound quite right either.

I didn’t know that I was different or ‘Other’, growing up until someone told me. I was eight years old when a kid at school asked me, “What are you?” I didn’t understand the question. “What am I?” I am a person. I am a human being. I am a girl. “No,” I remember him saying, “Where are you from?” I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, but when I was eight years old, my mother moved us to a town of 600 people in southern Illinois. It was there that I was asked, “What are you?” I told the boy that I was from Los Angeles, California. “Oh,” said the boy. “That tan will go away. When I got back from Mexico, I was so dark.” My tan will go away? That is something that needs to happen for me to be accepted? He said it as if he was solving a problem that I didn’t know I had. I was very confused by the interaction.

I was raised by my blonde, blue-eyed mother. My father wasn’t around growing up and I wasn’t raised in the black community. I didn’t understand racism, since I was never exposed to it until that day at the school in Southern Illinois. I didn’t know why my cousins were trying to tie two twigs together to create a cross to set fire to on my lawn. My mother had never exposed me to hate. I didn’t know what a burning cross on someone’s lawn meant.

My mother would later tell me about a time when I was a toddler playing at a park playground and one of the other mothers asked her, “How long have you had her?” My mother was like, “What do you mean? I am her mother. I gave birth to her. What do you mean how long have I had her?” People assumed that I was adopted, because my skin color and my mother’s didn’t match.

I would learn later that I didn’t quite fit in to the black community because I was raised white. But I was obviously not white. I had never heard the term mulatto, until I was in my twenties. I didn’t know that mulatto was historically used as a slur meaning “half breed.”

I learned about the Brown Paper Bag test when watching a comedian present a story for Black History Month. A black person could work in a club in 1940 as long as their skin was no darker than a brown paper bag. I tried the test myself and my skin tone matches the brown paper bag. Does that mean that I am not too black? Or does it mean that I am not black enough? Will I ever be accepted as who I am? Or shall I always be ‘Other’?

I am light skinned. I am high yellow. I am half breed. I am mulatto. I am BIPOC. I am blackish. I am other. And that is who I will always be. That boy at school was wrong, my tan didn’t go away. This is the skin that I was born in. This is who I am. And who I will always be, the same color as a brown paper bag.