"Black No More" and Afrofuturism

For this post, I want to discuss Black No More, by George S. Schuyler.  This novel was written in 1931 and aimed to expose some of the hypocrisy of society in its time.  This is something that Butler does as well, but Schuyler does it in a blatant, satirical way.  Also, it’s a riot.

The full title is Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940.  The novel is about a machine that turns black people into white people.  Dr. Crookman, who invented the machine, brings it to New York City and opens a business, “Black No More, Incorporated”, which offers the service of making black people white.  The service becomes wildly popular instantly and the novel follows the life of Max Disher, the first black man to use the machine.  

Schuyler uses blatant contradiction throughout the text to point out the hypocrisy of certain views of the time.  For example, Madame Sisseretta Blandish, a black character who is a satirical portrait of Madame C. J. Walker, is “elected for the fourth time a Vice-President of the American Race Pride League” while her business is described as “making Negroes appear as much like white folks as possible” (59).  Like Madame C. J. Walker, Blandish’s business is skin whiteners and hair straightening products.  Another example is Dr. Crookman, who is considered a “Race Man” because he is “so interested in the continued progress of the American Negroes that he wanted to remove all obstacles in their path by depriving them of their racial characteristics” altogether(55).  The “National Social Equality League” provides another example as they are “eager to end all oppression and persecution of the Negro” but also “never so happy and excited as when a Negro was barred from a theater or friend to a crisp” because it kept them in business.  These examples concern the hypocrisy within the black community but there are plenty characterized in the book of the white community as well.   

This text is Afrofuturistic because it uses science fiction to complicate the color line and explore the issues of racism and internalized racism.  Eshun states, “Afrofuturism’s specificity lies in assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations” (298).  Schuyler does exactly this; by messing with his characters ability to make race equal identity he forces them to define themselves in other ways.