love island & the "paper bag test"

Love Island & the "paper bag test" Love Island and the paper bag test. Let's talk about it. Bombshells thus far all have similar look. Think Soul, think Corbin, right? Think Kayda. It's all giving paperback test, ie, racially ambiguous baddies who all air on the side of like, really, really fair. Like I said, the diversity this season is 10 out of 10. Love Island USA is killing it in certain respects. But the bombshells are giving paperback test in a way that I think merits conversation. Paper bag test to use like, social barometer in the 20th century among Black Americans was a literal, literal paper bag deployed by fraternities and sororities and churches and schools. The goal of which was to make sure that membership in these places was exclusive to a very certain type of Black person. The test was incredibly insidious, but simple, right? If you were lighter than the paper bag, you secured membership, you are allowed in. If you were darker than the paper bag, when you had to get out. In 1928, a Howard student named Edward Taylor described the Kappa Alpha Back test. He said, the light-skinned students are sought after by the opportunities and sororities, particularly the latter, as members, and ones are passed by. Darker brown students then form their own cliques while the Blacks are left in the cold. And according to Professor Michael Eric Dyson, quote, New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party, gathering in a home where the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. Which is to say that the paper bag test was and is a furtherance of prejudice, except this time it's helmed by Black Americans. The test literally helped develop a caste system among Black Americans by which being lighter skin foretold a life of better opportunity. The lighter you were, the more easily you passed the paper bag test, the more easily you would secure good jobs and a good spouse and like entrance into these social clubs. It had very real life consequences. Like I said, this season of Love Island is especially diverse in a way that obviously merits applause, right? Like it's so diverse that Kenzie experienced being a minority for the first life and we're hearing conversations about colorism and what it means to be a dark-skinned person dating in America, right? Like these are great conversations, but all of that progress is confounded and muddled by the existence of a very particular type of bombshell, especially because on Love Island, being a bombshell connotes being like, of the beauty standard, at the height of beauty and the height of desire. If all of the bombshells then look a very particular way, Love Island is either consciously or subconsciously communicating a message to American viewers that is obviously very harmful. This could all be incredibly accidental, but I think it's a good way to talk about history, that it is always that deep. See you later. Bye.