Educational colorism channeled darker Blacks into submissive industrial training.

Evidence

For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White spaces. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the class-color stratification in Parable of the Sower and other depictions of intra-Black colorism; also connects to book’s core scheme as a policy-forced partition. — connects to: Black elites pursued the same education for racial empowerment whites sought for social control — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 236; Black schools’ industrial training was also a fiscal expedient for campus upkeep — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 169
• SEED: Article angle: the paper-bag test at churches and HBCUs as an overlooked mechanism of intra-community anti-Black policy.