Change Your Skin, Change Your Life?
Reviewing George S. Schuyler’s Afrofuturist Satire ‘Black No More’
Max Disher has found his woman! Visiting New York from Atlanta, the strawberry blonde enters the nightclub like she slid off a magazine cover. Hypnotized, Max can’t help but ask her to dance, even though he knows she’ll decline. Why? Max is black. The Southern belle turns him down flat and punctuates her rejection with a slur.
That should have been the end of it. But no. Enter Dr. Junius Crookman.
Thought Experiment
What would happen if black Americans suddenly turned white and vanished into the caucasian population? Racial bigotry and strife would vanish, too, right? Same with all the institutions designed to either profit from prejudice or ameliorate its impact?
One way to look at satire is as a social experiment in which the satirist plays with the variables in unpredictable ways. For the black journalist and critic George S. Schuyler writing on the downslope of the Harlem Renaissance, that meant fiddling with the nobs of race and class on the control board of American society.
While Max nurses his bruised ego the morning after, his friend Bunny calls and points him to an item in the paper. “Negro Announces Remarkable Discovery,” the headline reads. “Can Change Black to White in Three Days.” The inventor of this earthshaking procedure, the African American scientist Dr. Crookman, sees this development as a way of solving the country’s race problem. Max sees it as way to hook up with the woman that turned him down. He races down to Dr. Crookman’s Black-No-More clinic and becomes one of his first patients: “He was free! The world was his oyster and he had the open-sesame of a pork-colored skin!”
Almost a hundred years after it was written, Schuyler’s 1931 Black No More deserves consideration purely as a thought experiment—and all the more so when contemplating its satirical edge.
The Satirical Edge
We can, for instance, easily imagine the ways a procedure such as Dr. Crookman’s might destablize the black community: black-owned cosmetic businesses designed to lighten and whiten quickly go out of business and so do organizations dedicated to black advancement. Once their target audiences have undergone Dr. Crookman’s miraculous “cure,” neither are needed. A new kind of white flight hits Harlem as former blacks look to establish new identities and distance themselves from any markers of their race.
What’s more impishly enjoyable? Seeing how Schuyler’s premise destabilizes the white community, suddenly fearful of formerly black neighbors marrying into their families and taking their jobs. Reaction to Crookman’s procedure not only causes some whites to look for ways of tanning themselves darker than usual (a shade separate and still as unequal as they can manage), it also causes an uptick in membership in the nation’s premier white-supremacy organization, the Knights of Nordica (Schuyler’s comic dig at the KKK) and a controversy that eventually engulfs U.S. presidential politics.
Into that hot pot of molten lava jump Max (looking for love) and Dr. Crookman (with no other option to save his business).
Max changes his name along with his color. When he turns up in Atlanta, he answers to Matthew Fisher. It takes a while, but he eventually locates the strawberry blonde with the pretty face and the cold shoulder, Helen Givens. Time for a second at-bat. Just one complication: Her father is Rev. Henry Givens, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of Nordica. No matter. Matthew ingratiates himself to the family, wins Helen’s hand, and becomes his father-in-law’s second in command, the Grand Exalted Giraw, publicly fighting Black-No-More and Dr. Crookman.
How does that work, exactly? When Bunny finds Matthew in Atlanta he wonders the same thing. Matthew explains his “high strategy” to him: “I don’t want my side to get such an upper hand that it will put the other side out of business, or vice versa. What we want is the status quo.”
“This thing is more complicated than a flapper’s past,” says Bunny but signs on to help the cause for a hefty salary, payable by the tsunami of anxious white cash flooding the organization.
Things quickly spin out of control.
Fantastic and Farcical
After a speech by Rev. Givens on the existential threat posed by Black-No-More, the U.S. president, a Republican, asks Congress to appropriate money for a formal investigation. Months pass before publication of the final 1,789-page report, which only nine people read. By then, however, Matthew has a plan to get Rev. Givens elected president on the Democratic ticket in the next election.
One hitch: A psyops campaign goes terribly wrong, and its key findings end up in the hands of Crookman and the Republicans. After a detailed genealogical investigation of U.S. citizens, it turns out vastly more people are touched by miscegenation than previously thought. Instead of 20 million Americans sharing black ancestry, the number is nearer 50 million—including among those who might least welcome the news. Rev. Henry Givens, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Knights of Nordica, Democratic candidate for U.S. president, is, for instance, “only four generations removed from a mulatto ancestor.” There goes the election!
Readers can take Schuyler’s Black No More, like most works of satire, as critique or farce. It works on both levels. Though some references and zingers have dulled with time, the comic force still hits home. I laughed all the way through, even at the sinister moments—as when, for instance, two white supremacists try hiding out in blackface, fall into the hands of a lynch mob, and quickly regret their diguise.
And what of Max/Matthew and Helen? There are lasting consequences to white lies, but I leave those for you to discover.
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This is why I subscribe to your SubStack, John. I had no idea this book existed, and now I can't wait to get a copy and read it!
This sounds like a book to be read, but it is very near the truth too. I remember coming across an old black and white film of the 1940s, called 'Pinky', based on a novel of the same name, I believe, that portrayed the immense difficulty that those with both African and European ancestry who could be "white passing" had in finding their place in segregated American society. It was the existence of those "mixed race" people that led to the anti-miscegenation laws of the Jim Crow era South - the whites were terrified that they could accidentally marry and conceive children with a "white-passing" person. The dark irony of their fear was that the rape of enslaved women by their white owners to produce more slaves had already led to the extensive mixing of African and European genetics in the U.S. I recently read 'The Underground Railroad Records', a firsthand record, by a former slave, William Still, who worked on the Underground after his escape, of those who escaped slavery in the decades just before the Civil War - several of those in the record were able to use the fact that they look looked like their slaveowner fathers to escape undetected.