Can You Pass the Color Bar?

Gift of Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch

Ce Scott-Fitts’s mixed-media assemblage takes as its subject blues singer and songwriter Big Bill Broonzy and his popular song "Black, Brown, and White" to speak to privilege and exclusion in contemporary media. The title is a double entendre, citing both a Jim Crow–era term denoting a barrier that prevented Black people from participating in various activities with White people, and the color bar utilized to calibrate color in still photography and motion pictures.

The original color bar, patented by Kodak, excluded development chemicals that brought out various red, yellow, and brown tones, intentionally idealizing and favoring lighter skin tones and entrenching bias against darker tones in visual media production. Scott-Fitts’s eight-tone color bar—composed solely of skin tones excluded from the original color bar—is positioned beneath jars of pigments and handwritten lines of Broonzy’s song. The central trophy-like figure brings to mind the #OscarsSoWhite controversy over the nearly all white (and in some categories, all male) nominees at the Academy Awards. Four paper bags are also included, each printed with the text “If you are darker than this brown paper bag, you will not be admitted.” The “paper bag test” was commonly used from 1900 through the 1950s—sometimes even demonstrating bias and a preference for lighter skin tones within the Black community.