High Yellow - Use As Social Class Distinction

Use As Social Class Distinction

In an aspect of colorism, "high yellow" was also related to social class distinctions among people of color. In post-Civil War South Carolina, according to one account by historian Edward Ball, "Members of the colored elite were called 'high yellow' for their shade of skin", as well as slang terms meaning snobbish. In New Orleans, the term "high-yellow" was associated with Creole "brahmins". In the era of Duke Ellington, a native of Washington, D.C.,

social life was dominated by light-skinned 'high yellow' families, some pale enough to 'pass for white,' who shunned and despised darker African-Americans. The behaviour of high yellow society was a replica of high white, except that whereas the white woman invested in tightly curled permanents and, at least if young, cultivated a deep sun tan, the colored woman used bleach lotions and Mrs. Walker's "Anti-Kink" or the equivalent to straighten hair.

In some cases the confusion of color with class came about because some of the lighter-skinned blacks came from families of mixed heritage free before the Civil War, who had begun to accumulate education and property. In addition, some wealthier white planters made an effort to have their "natural" sons (the term for children outside marriage created with enslaved women) educated or trained as apprentices; some passed on property to them. For instance, in 1860, most of the 200 subscription students at Wilberforce College were the mixed-race sons of white planters, who paid for their education.

These social distinctions made the cosmopolitan Harlem more appealing to many blacks. The Cotton Club of the Prohibition era "had a segregated, white-only audience policy and a color-conscious, 'high yellow' hiring policy for chorus girls". It was common for lighter-skinned African Americans to hold "paper bag parties," which admitted only those whose complexion was lighter than that of a brown paper bag.

In her 1942 Glossary of Harlem Slang, Zora Neale Hurston placed "high yaller" at the beginning of the entry for colorscale, which ran:

"high yaller, yaller, high brown, vaseline brown, seal brown, low brown, dark brown"