I’m stumped on this one, it was in a list with others like paper bag test and comb test(the first I’d guess would be whether someone is lighter or darker than a paper bag and the second whether you can comb your hair).
Light doesn’t reflect as well off dark skin. The old racial trope was you couldn’t see a black person in the dark unless they smiled.
It may be insensitive but it is true that light doesn’t reflect well off darker complexions, Italians, Mexicans, African Americans. I took some engagement photos for a friend and his future wife. I had a heck of a time getting them lit for nice photos. A flash just wasn’t enough. They were coming out very dark and muddy until I set up a spot light.
This article has an explanation of all three; the flashlight test compared your skin features to that of a “true” white person. Also, you are correct about the paper bag test but the comb test involved whether your hair looked like an African’s or not (if you passed the paper bag and flashlight tests, you would fail if it was).
These were all used when accepting admissions to colleges and universities for blacks. What I don’t get though is why they would deny admission to a college designed to serve African Americans if you had any African-American features (no skin darker than a paper bag, no African hair and no African features); I’d expect all of the opposite criteria, unless this is something I don’t know about (I just found this stuff on Google).
How is that insensitive? That’s precisely what “dark” means.
And this still doesn’t tell us what the test was. You don’t need to shine a flashlight at a person to determine that their skin doesn’t reflect light well-- Whatever light you’re using to see anything would be enough for that.
The flashlight test was used to assess the profile of the “subject”; presumably a shadow was cast on a wall, which allowed the shape of the lips and the nose to be categorized as more African or more Caucasian.