Black No More Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land ... Book

Here is a fantastic brainspinning cringemaking you-can’t-say-THAT! satire from 1931 which would be a perfect addition to any Black Lives Matter reading list in order to show that in the right hands a broad comedy about racism in the USA is not only possible but is a very welcome place to rest and recuperate for a moment or two, and look at the whole problem again from the strangest perspective.

George Schuyler has the highest of high concepts – a black doctor invents a process to turn black Americans white. It’s cheap and available to all. Got that ? Now let the uneasy laughter begin.

The process is available at the various clinics operated by Black No More Incorporated, and it’s immediately wildly popular. Our author drily comments :

A lifetime of being Negroes in the United States had convinced them that there was a great advantage in being white.

We follow the fortunes of one black chancer Max Disher, who wants to be the very first to turn white. And he does. The leaving of black society give him twinges of remorse :

Max stood irresolutely in the midst of the gibbering crowd of people. Unaccountably he felt at home here among these black folk. Their jests, scraps of conversation and lusty laughter all seemed like heavenly music.

Well, that wistfulness doesn’t last long. He immediately thinks

What a treat it would be to mingle with white people in places where as a youth he had never dared to enter. At last he felt like an American citizen.

Very soon Max is off on some adventures amongst the racists of the southern states.

Let’s just take a pace back here. This is a science fiction idea and you have to swallow it lock stock & barrel for the satire to work. George Schuyler dismisses any issues of different physiognomy – it seems all this is “fixed” during the whitening process. That leaves one very obvious difference – language. Surely all these blacks-turned-white would still speak in the same way, using their usual vocabulary, mannerisms, slang, and so on, and therefore be instantly recognisable. George Schuyler waves all this away in one unconvincing paragraph. The reader has to just get on board with the idea that these whitened blacks cannot be distinguished from white people.

He follows through the logic of this massive ironic offensive idea mostly in order to deal satirical blows to both white and black politics, wheelers and dealers, the capitalist barons who use race to suppress the Southern white workers, the grandiose black charities, the community leaders, the great and the good - they all get it in the neck.

I think he loves to goad intellectuals the most :

Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race.

and again

During his leisure time he wrote long and learned articles, bristling with references, for the more intellectual magazines, in which he sought to prove conclusively that the plantation shouts of Southern Negro peons were superior to any of Beethoven’s symphonies and that the city of Benin was the original site of the Garden of Eden.

and yet again

His well-known work “The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet among the Assyrians during the Ninth Century before Christ” had been favourably commented upon by several reviewers, one of whom had actually read it

Of Dr Bonds, head of the Negro Data League :

He was engaged in a most vital and necessary work, i.e. collecting bales of data to prove satisfactorily to all that more money was needed to collect more data.

The revolutionary Black No More process, strangely, according to George, does not provoke any white supremacist violence :

As there had never been more than two million Negroes in the North, the whitening process had been viewed indifferently by the masses because those who controlled the channels of opinion felt that the country was getting rid of a very vexatious problem at absolutely no cost.

It’s quite true that Schuyler does not get into the detail of how the “new whites” would possibly live their lives, and how existing whites would reacts to the rapid vanishing of black people in the USA (by page 132 practically all blacks in America are now white). But to do any of that would capsize the fast and furious momentum of this delicious novel as it races towards some final corkscrewingly ironic twists.

Oh yes, and when you think George has, well, been softer and kinder to everybody than you were expecting, he ambushes you with an ending that shows the teeth and dripping red claws under this brilliant comedy.

Totally recommended.