Discrimination and racism in public schools is not only projected towards students and faculty of color from non colored students and faculty, it is also projected from person of color to person of color resulting in what is called colorism. Colorism is a form of discrimination in which human beings are accorded different social treatment based on skin color (wikipedia.com). In most cases, colorism is projected at people of the same in group, for instance the comparisons made between lighter skinned African Americans and darker skinned African Americans.
One commonly known instance of colorism among African American students within higher education is the Brown Paper Bag test of the early 1900’s. This test was used among groups like sororities and fraternities to weed out who was eligble to join and who was not based on the lightness or darkness of a person’s skin. “If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag, you did not merit inclusion” (urbandictinoary.com). Within some school systems lighter skinned students were sometimes given privalages over darker skinned students due to the idea that lighter skinned students were closer to being white. Even in the age of slavery, lighter skin slaves were treated better than the darker skin slaves. The lighter skin slaves were sometimes made to work inside of the slave master’s home if at all, and they were also given the provilege to become educated, while the darker skinned slaves worked in the feilds and were often mistreated.
Stemming from this, African Americans project colorism towards eachother in a number of ways, varying to who has ”better hair” to who is prettier or more handsome. In Spike Lee’s “School Daze” he portrays instances colorism in a historically black college between two sororitites, both who did not get along with eachother because of their differences in skin color. In the movie the lighter skinned girls refered to the darker skinned girls as “jigaboos” or “tar babies”, and the darker skinned girls refered to the lighter skinned girls as “wannabe’s” or “Baribe dolls” all without the notion that each and everyone of them was of the same race.
