High Yellow

High Yellow in Pigmentocratic America

“High” refers to the privileges accorded to light-complexioned African Americans, who more closely resembled white Americans in terms of phenotype, that put them atop the pigment-based societal system in the United States during the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras. According to Zora Neale Hurston's Glossary of Harlem Slang (1942), that system was constituted in the following manner: high yaller; yaller; high brown; Vaseline brown; seal brown; low brown; dark brown. The advantages that light-skinned blacks sometimes enjoyed ranged from better access to resources to greater acceptance by whites. Some individuals with lighter complexions and phenotypes atypical of most individuals of African descent posed as white (particularly Mediterranean), Native American, Arab, or Asian to avoid the discrimination African Americans faced.

Some lighter-complexioned African Americans from mixed-race families were freed, educated, and/or bequeathed property prior to emancipation. This accumulation of wealth and education afforded them distinct social advantages over darker-skinned African Americans. A number of institutions, ranging from fraternal organizations to churches to New York City's famed Cotton Club, instituted “paper bag” policies that limited membership or admittance to individuals whose complexions were at least as light as a brown paper bag.

There were even several communities comprised of light-skinned African Americans, including in Charleston, South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Charles City, Virginia, that mirrored contemporaneous white communities in many ways, including in their rejection of darker-complexioned blacks. Accordingly, high yellow was employed sometimes as a colloquial term for the lordly behavior associated with some light-skinned blacks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the contemporary United States, “high yellow” is considered an antiquated, and even pejorative, expression. According to 2010 U.S. Census data, 2.9 percent of Americans, or more than nine million people, identify as multiethnic, and approximately 1.8 million Americans identify as biracial of black and white ancestry; since the 1960s, most of them commonly have self-identified as biracial, multiracial, multiethnic, or mixed race. As of 2012, the term has not disappeared entirely, although it is frequently employed in an ironic manner or for rhetorical flourish.

The Cultural Legacy of High Yellow

In abolitionist literature beginning in the 1840s, light-complexioned blacks were used to evoke sympathy from white audiences for the plight of black Americans; these stories featured characters who looked like the white readers but suffered as African Americans did. These stories often featured a biracial heroine who was light-complexioned enough to pass for white. She struggled because she was unable to find full acceptance with either the black or white communities. Once her true ethnic background was made public, she lost her comfortable station in society and was reduced to bankruptcy, sexual victimization, slavery, or death. These plays and novels were aimed at white women readers; their aim was to warn audiences of the dangers of racism by way of identification with a character who shared their social class and appearance. Some of these works include Imitation of Life (a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst that was twice adapted for the screen, in 1934 [Page 1065]and 1959), Reginald Marsh's 1936 painting titled High Yaller; the 1949 film Pinky (based on the 1946 novel Quality by Cid Ricketts Sumner); and Larry Buchanan's 1965 film High Yellow, which concerns racial passing.

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