When a procedure is discovered that can turn Black people white, an unlikely new era of racial fear begins. Max Disher is a likable, streetwise denizen of Harlem. While at the Honky Tonk Club with his friend Bunny, he approaches a white woman he’s always fancied. When he asks her to dance, she coldly dismisses him with a racial epithet. Max is humiliated and crushed. The next morning his friend Bunny calls him, with the news of a new procedure that can turn Black people white. It’s a process that has been developed by Dr Junius Crookman, a Black scientist who has studied in Germany. The Black-No-More procedure (it is widely promoted as such) turns out to be a big hit, and a big money spinner. There’s even a spin off – coloured babies from nominally white unions can be put through the process. Finally, people can free themselves from being the subjects of systemic racial prejudice. Having turned himself white, Max Fisher goes into partnership with a white supremacist, Reverend Harry Givens, the leader of a group called The Knights of Nordica. What is Max doing there, the reader may well ask? Making a lot of money. As white fears rise that Black people could be everywhere but undetectable, memberships of The Knights of Nordica are skyrocket. Max Fisher, being a Black man, knows exactly how to press the buttons of frightened white people. Racial fear turns into a great money spinner. Armed with loads of cash, The Knights of Nordica get involved in politics, teaming up with the Anglo-Saxon Association, headed by the aptly named Arthur Snobbcraft. They hire a statistician to investigate the nation’s genealogy, hoping to use their findings to smear their opponents as racially impure. The shock results show that most Americans have at least some African blood flowing in their veins. Horror of horrors, Givens and Snobbcraft, it turns out, are part Black. The sections in Black No More describing the Knights of Nordica and its leader, Harry Givens, are spookily reminiscent of Donald Trump. Especially the Knights' large public rallies where the crowds are fired up up on a hot brew of conspiracy theory and xenophobia. The organisation's newspaper, The Warning, pumps out fear mongering rubbish akin to today’s self-congratulatory tweets. “...14-point, one syllable word editorials painted terrifying pictures of the menace confronting white supremacy...Very cleverly it linked up the pope, the Yellow Peril, the Alien Invasion and Foreign Entanglements with Black-No-More as devices of the Devil.” Sound familiar? The portrait of the smugly ignorant Reverend Harry Givens reminds of today's empty headed populists. We learn that enraptured audiences flocked to see Givens talk. “...night after night (they) sat spellbound while Rev. Givens, who had finished the eighth grade in a one-room country school, explained the laws of heredity and spoke eloquently of the danger of black babies.” We also learn that poor white workers are easily kept exploited and non-unionised by their fears about Black people. They allow their rights to be usurped, their attention besotted by racial anxieties. Racism economically disempowers poor white folk. George S. Schuyler published this acerbic satire in 1931. It’s set a few years in the future, between 1933 – 1940, and for that reason has been selected for Penguin Classic’s science fiction imprint. But the novel is really a brutal, excoriating critique of race in America. White and Black groups – the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP – are criticised in equal measure. Schuyler is ruthless about what he sees as the weaknesses of Black leadership. As a work of fiction, the characters are two-dimensional, the plot farcical. Most of the characters are given absurdist surnames: Snobbcraft, Crookman, Buggerie. The book’s fictional aspects are more cartoon than literature (it's also quite funny). And yet what an almighty wallop this book serves. A diabolical critique of race, power and money in modern America. Black No More, by George S. Schuyler. Published by Penguin. $19.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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