Old Ideas, New Visions

By Mark Lacey

Black No More was published in 1931, making it the earliest science fiction novel written by an African-American I’ve ever read. Being almost a century old, there is plenty of offensive material, including plentiful use of the “n-word,” but if Professor Rafia Zafar saw fit to include it in her collection Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s, who am I to argue? 

George Schuyler’s premise is that an African-American scientist figured out how to make African-Americans cosmetically, but not genetically, indistinguishable from Euro-Americans, and imagines the cultural and economic havoc it would cause as the scientist gets rich off his process.  There are, of course, many differences from how people would react today, in a world that has had the “Black is Beautiful” movement, but at the same time, reactions we would recognize, such as fake news and conservative elites struggling to keep the lower economic classes divided and politically impotent without being able to play the race card.  Schuyler doesn’t seem to like anyone very much, since he also portrays African-American political leadership in a negative light, panicking to keep their jobs after the rank and file leave their organizations.

The protagonist of the novel is Max Disher, an African-American player so affronted by a white woman rejecting his invitation to dance that he becomes the first to get the treatment. Once passing as white, he moves through the Euro-American world with the cunning and confident aplomb of James diGriz from The Stainless Steel Rat series, finding white people to be stupid, dull, and almost as mean to each other as they are to blacks.  He meets a minister who became wealthy by joining the KKK and embezzling so much money the organization went bankrupt, something even more plausible now in the wake of the NRA scandals.  Disher joins forces with the minister to create a new white cultural identity con to separate rich racists from their money, and marries his daughter who was the woman who originally rejected his invitation to dance.

Don’t worry. That’s only the first half of the novel. When Disher decides to run his father-in-law for President, the plot really gets crazy. The narrative’s brisk style doesn’t bother describing most of the world, just the characters he wishes to mock. The cultural disintegration of the United States is more vivid and violent than Ayn Rand portrayed in Atlas Shrugged, but both result from irrationality poisoning society. It falls apart faster in Black No More, but that could be explained by pointing out the irrationality fracturing America in Atlas Shrugged was a foreign ideology, like a virus our white blood cells will fight, while the racial paranoia in Black No More is an innate threat like hemophilia, always just under the skin waiting to threaten life. When I read African-American literature, I often take away the impression that racists are subconsciously aware of the fragility of their moral position, which is why they are often so angry in its defense.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how easy it was to draw many parallels between their political ironies and our own.  In my own lifetime, our political arguments haven’t changed much from All in the Family to West Wing, we just talk about them differently. Prejudice is still prejudice, pride is still pride, and while the forces of racism ebb and flow in our cultural awareness, they never go away, just bide their time.