Black No More

Book #2 for 2024. Danzy Senna’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Black No More helpfully notes that, in later life, author George S. Schuyler swung to the political hard right, even joining the John Birch Society (surprisingly, I find that though the latter were super far right loons, they were oddly anti-racist despite that). Having read his book, written and published while he was still an otherwise good and committed socialist, I find myself strangely unsurprised by this; Schuyler clearly had, shall we say, reservations about his fellow African Americans that, had the book been written by a white author, it would’ve been considered even in 1931 to be unnecessarily racist. But Schuyler was black and, evidently, an equal opportunity hater; white people come out of this one every bit as badly.

The premise of Black No More is that a black medical entrepreneur has developed a technique for turning black people into white people permanently (no more need for skin lightening creams and hair straightening!), and our fairly dubious “hero” takes advantage of this new technology after being spurned on New Year’s Eve by a young woman who doesn’t dance with… you know, his kind of people (the book, obviously, is a lot blunter in its language). But what happens when all the black people in America go white? What do actual white people do without them around? How can they define themselves as white people without black people to define themselves against?

The book makes for fairly bruising satire of both white and black America in the then-near future of the mid-1930s; Schuyler applies equal venom to the corruption and uselessness of black leaders as well as the way the rural white workers are taught to fear foreign and other racial influences to distract them from how capitalism is their real problem. The cynicism is quite bracing and results in a lot of delightful descriptive passages, but narratively the idea only stretches so far and I felt the book ran out of puff about halfway through (mind you, it does come to a fairly remarkable climax), as you can kind of see by some of the character names getting overtly silly (hard not to love “Dr Samuel Buggerie”, though). A fun read, but when all was said and done, I think I found it easier to admire than really like as such.