High yellow

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French novelist Alexandre Dumas, père was called "High Yellow" in Time magazine.

High yellow, occasionally simply yellow (dialect: yaller, yeller), is a term for very light-skinned African-Americans and is a reference to the golden yellow skin tone of some mixed-race people. The term was in common use in the United States at the end of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, and appears in many popular songs of the era, such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

"High" derives from the fact that these individuals are so light skinned, they often pass for white. Many high yellows are as light skinned as Europeans, and even lighter than some Europeans. Their specific skin hue is generally not caused by albinism, contrary to popular belief, but theorized to be caused by a level of a mixture with Europeans and chance inheritance of melanin-production regulating genes from the white ancestors. In other cases, some African-descending individuals simply have natural lighter-skinned genes than most other Africans, without biracial admixturing.^[1]

In an aspect of colorism, "high yellow" also had aspects of social class distinctions. 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.^[2] In New Orleans, the term "high-yellow" was associated with Creole "brahmins".^[3] In the era of Duke Ellington, a native of Washington, D.C.,

[The city's] 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.

These social distinctions made the cosmopolitan Harlem more appealing.^[4] Nevertheless, 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".^[5]

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

^{[citation needed]}

1 Applied to individuals
2 Art and popular culture
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Applied to individuals

The French author Alexandre Dumas, one of whose grandmothers was a Haitian slave, had skin "with a yellow so high it was almost white", and in a 1929 review, TIME magazine called him a "High Yellow Fictioneer".^[6]

[edit] Art and popular culture

The terminology and its cultural aspects were explored in Dael Orlandersmith's play Yellowman, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in drama. The play depicts a dark-skinned girl whose own mother "inadvertently teaches her the pain of rejection and the importance of being accepted by the 'high yellow' boys." One reviewer described the term as having "the inherent, unwieldy power to incite black Americans with such intense divisiveness and fervor" as few others.^[7]

The phrase survives in folk songs such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas", which originally referred to Emily West Morgan, a "mulatto" indentured servant apocryphally associated with the Battle of San Jacinto, but was later bowdlerized. Blind Willie McTell's song "Lord, Send Me an Angel" has its protagonist forced to choose between three women, described as "Atlanta yellow", "Macon brown", and a "Statesboro blackskin".^[8] And Bessie Smith's song "I've Got What It Takes", by Clarence Williams, refers to "a slick high yeller" boyfriend who "turned real pale" when she wouldn't wait for him to get out of jail.^[8] As recently as 2004, white R&B singer-songwriter Teena Marie released a song titled "High Yellow Girl," said to be about her daughter Alia Rose^[9], who is biracial.^[10]