Product Description

Modern Library Harlem Renaissance

What would happen to the race problem in America if black people turned white? Would everybody be happy? These questions and more are answered hilariously in Black No More, George S. Schuyler's satiric romp. Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can't beat them, turn into them.
        Ishmael Reed, one of today's top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited Introduction.

The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920- 1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today's renaissance of black writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77525 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-29
• Released on: 1999-06-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375753800
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
This satirical Harlem Renaissance-era novel by black conservative intellectual George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), who wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier and contributed to the NAACP's influential Crisis magazine, is a hilariously insightful treatise on the absurdities of racial identity. Dr. Junius Crookman, a Harlem-based African American physician, mysteriously returns from Germany with a formula that can transform black people into whites. "It looked," Schuyler deadpans, "as though science was to succeed where the Civil War failed." One of the first to enlist Dr. Crookman's services is an insurance salesman named Max Disher, who as the white Matthew Fisher is now free to pursue the white women who once rejected him and otherwise bask in Euro-American social privilege (including a top position in a hate group called the Knights of Nordica). Schuyler unveils the futility of this electro-chemical form of "passing" through the emptiness the Disher/Fisher character encounters in the white cultural world, which doesn't measure up to the Harlem nightlife--revealing the poison behind the notion of wanting to be something you're not. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From Kirkus Reviews
37575380.X99 Schuyler, George BLACK NO MORE First published in 1931, this scathing satire on race embodies all the controversial notions of its author, the grouchy journalist and essayist Schuyler, a kindred spirit of his mentor and fellow misanthrope, H.L. Mencken. Best know for his dissenting essay, The Negro-Art Hokum, Schuyler (1895-1977) mocked most of the more prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance, and asks in this rollicking bit of speculative fiction: What if black people could change themselves to white? Inspired by popular products for skin-lightening, Schuyler imagines the discovery of a process that transforms Negroes into white people, and then watches all hell break loose. When Dr. Junius Crookman promises a three-day makeover, Max Disher, a dapper insurance agent with a taste for yallah gals, thinks of one thingall the ofay girls he can now pursue, especially a snobby cracker who snubbed him in a Harlem night club. For fifty bucks, Max is one of Crookmans first patients and emerges from his Frankenstein-like office with his new pork-colored skin. But Maxs glorious new adventure turns ugly right away: his old friends reject him; his landlady accuses him of no race pride, and worsehe finds white people less courteous and less interesting. The country too grows increasingly hysterical: the South calls for congressional action, and the infrastructure of Negro philanthropy begins to crumble. Scuyler smartly postulates the response of official black leadership, and saves his most damning portraits for characters who represent Garvey, DuBois, and Booker T., all of whom ultimately give in to the new process. Maxs dilemma is simpler: he tries to figure out a way to capitalize off his new identity, and soon becomes the right hand man to the Rev. Givens, the grand poobah of the Knights of Nordica, and eventually marries his daughter, the very same girl from that night in Harlem. One problem remains, the whitening process doesnt pass to babies, so Max lives with the fear that his offspring will be his undoing. Not to worry, though, for events overwhelm all in this increasingly outrageous novel. As the hypocrisies mount, and the number of Negroes diminish, calls for racial purity increase. But the frantic researches into genealogy have an unintended resultand one that Schuyler himself constantly arguedthat most white people have dusky ancestors, or as the Rev. Givens so aptly puts it, I guess were all niggers now. Schuylers miscegenetic ideas on race fuel this well-written look at chromatic democracy, a novel that prefigures both Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison. This wild book is much more than an historical curiosity, and its resurrection is a revelation. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"One of the great new veins of Negro fiction has been opened by this book--may its tribe increase."--Alain Locke -- Review

...funny, astute, and alarmingly up-to-date. -- Entertainment Weekly, Suzanne Ruta

Customer Reviews

Life is a Con
George Schuyler's (1895-1977) novel, Black No More, is a deliciously wicked satire on 1920s American racial mores. First published in 1931, it was initially reissued during the late 1980s as part of The Northeastern Library of Black Literature.

Like many satires, Black No More takes a common, controversial idea, gives it form in flesh and blood, and plays it out to its logical conclusion: "What if white America didn't have any more negroes to kick around?"

This idea is realized by "Dr. Junius Crookman" (most of the characters have similarly "subtle" names), who invents an operation for turning black folks white. In lightning speed, the nation becomes monochromatic, as its entire black population "disappears."

No lack of comic -- and dramatic -- complications ensue, when it becomes clear that the operation doesn't change the genetic program for the pigmentation of one's offspring.

George Schuyler worked from a few basic premises: Most of humanity is a damned sight closer to the Devil than to the angels; most men are con artists; and the few who truly believe in anything are even worse!

For Schuyler, W.E.B. DuBois' (1868-1963) "talented tenth" of bourgeois negro society was of no more help to the average black than were the leaders of the racist, white order. Indeed, Schuyler saw those who made a living railing against Jim Crow as having the strongest interest in its preservation: every lynching brought in more money from rich, white reformers.

Thinly veiled caricatures portray DuBois ("Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard") as a hypocrite, and Marcus Garvey (1887-1940; "Santop Licorice"), the founder of the "Back-to-Africa" movement, as a common swindler (for which Garvey was, in fact, convicted in 1920, and deported in 1924).

For Schuyler, black nationalist rhetoric was merely a smokescreen to obscure its practitioners' class contempt for their erstwhile constituents, whose pockets they were busy picking. (Has anything changed in the meantime?!)

Down deep, Schuyler says, we're all the same -- and God save us! Ultimately, he surmises, if there weren't a color line, men would have had to invent one! His metaphor for American race relations was that of an "insane asylum." (Already during the 1920s -- 60 years before Dinesh D'Souza -- Schuyler had written a pamphlet arguing that total miscegenation, eliminating all distinct races, was the sole cure for America's racial madness.)

Though many of Schuyler's characters are -- as per his genre -- stereotypes, the central pair of "Max Discher/Matthew Fisher" and "Bunny Brown" are as engaging a couple of rogues as any you're likely to be fleeced by, this side of Rudyard Kipling or Chester Himes, their banter generously peppered with the black vernacular of the day.

George Schuyler was a great lover of science fiction, especially the then stupendously popular novels of H.G. Wells. He is the only notable black American novelist to smoothly incorporate science fiction motifs into his work. (To Samuel R. Delany fans: I said "notable" and "smoothly.")

In addition to Schuyler's great story, there are two other reasons for reading Black No More.

First, as by far the most influential black newspaperman this nation has ever seen, George Schuyler bestrode the negro press, and thus, negro America, like a colossus.

From 1924-1966, Schuyler worked at black America's most influential newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. But George Schuyler didn't "write" for the Courier; he WAS the Courier. He wrote the weekly, unsigned house editorial; a weekly column, News and Views; wired in scoops and exposes from around America and the world so amazing as to catch the attention of the day's most respected, white newspapers, who also published his work; penned the pseudonymous, serialized pulp novels and short stories that were the Courier's most popular features; and engaged other prominent contemporaries to write for the Courier. It was Schuyler, for instance, who engaged pop historian J.A. Rogers to write the Courier's immensely popular feature on black history. The various strategies of silence and misrepresentation, which are today used (for instance, by alleged journalist Jill Nelson and by Henry Louis Gates Jr.) to erase or diminish Schuyler's legacy, belong to contemporary black studies and black journalism's many scandals.

The second reason for reading Black No More (together with the serialized novels published in book form as Black Empire) is for Schuyler's role as unwitting intellectual godfather of the Nation of Islam. The Nation stole its theory of the "myth of Yacub," which claims that the white man was created 6,000 years ago by an evil black scientist, from Schuyler's Black No More, except that the Nation, as was its wont, turned Schuyler's story on its head. (Schuyler, for his part, was reworking H.G. Wells' story, The Island of Dr. Moreau.)

So read Black No More, enjoy some belly laughs, and learn some history in the bargain.

Black No More has an overly informative foreword by James A. Miller, which is best read as an afterword (so as not to ruin your enjoyment of the book), to clarify historical questions.

Originally published in 1992 in A Different Drummer magazine.

Wonderful and thought provoking
In my search for quality books written by black writers, I stumbled upon BLACK NO MORE and I am so glad that I did. This is a relatively small book, but probably one of the most thought provoking books that I've ever read. It forces you to look at the power of racisim in all of its incarnations, whether it is being imposed on black people from white people or if it is imposed on blacks from their own people. I think that George Schuyler is one of the most unsung heroes of African American literature and all people (especially Black people) should find the time to read his work. I'm currently purchasing anything I can find that he has written.

Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up
Although largely forgotten today, George Schuyler was probably the foremost black journalist of the early 20th Century. No doubt much of his modern-day intellectual exile is due to Schuyler's politics. While the rest of black America lurched left, Schuyler published his autobiography, BLACK AND CONSERVATIVE, the title of which says it all. Combine that with Schuyler's noted attack on Malcolm X and, more infamously, his scathing criticism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Schuyler's alienation became complete. Too bad for the rest of us, as his writing is often quite delicious.

Schuyler occasionally ventured into fiction and BLACK NO MORE is probably the best known of such works. Although the book is often described as science fiction, that label is a tad misleading. It is an extremely entertaining social critique of the American obsession with race and skin color and is packed with the same race hustlers, con artists, demagogues and hypocrites we still see today. I guess the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.

Dr. Junius Crookman (great name, huh?) develops the technology to turn black people white. The first to sign on, Max Disher, uses his new found whiteness to woo the white ladies who would have nothing to do with him before and, hilariously, climb the ladder of a white supremacist hate group. He does not do this out of any desire to pull a fast one on The Man, but rather sees it as the fast track to making a quick buck.

White supremacists are not Schuyler's only target, however. The black advancement organization, clearly modeled on the NAACP, is deeply alarmed - deeply - that soon there will be no more oppressed negroes whose woes will fill the group's coffers and allow its leadership to dine on foie gras. This group's leader is also lampooned appropriately. Apparently W.E.B. Du Bois was the warm-up act for the aforementioned critiques of Malcolm X and MLK, Jr.

Not allowing a good book to end on a sour note, Schuyler brings things full circle at the end, when it is discovered that blacks who have undergone the treatment are a shade whiter than natural born whites! And so the cycle continues. BLACK NO MORE is a treat from an unfortunately largely overlooked figure. Check it out.