The Harlem obsession with skin-tone and the concurrent debates about eugenic improvement provide the substance for George Schuyler’s satiric novel Black No More (Schuyler, 1932). Schuyler’s story takes to its logical conclusion the connection between fetishisation of light skin and eugenic science. His novel presents a quite literal ‘black is white’ world where African Americans, courtesy of a machine that could grace the pages of a H.G. Wells novel, become whiter than the white folks.

The novel follows the adventures of the young blade Max Disher as he undergoes Dr Junius Crookman’s Black-No-More treatment and passes into white society to become a leading light of a white supremacist clan, The Knights of Nordica. The plot pursues the consequences of this reversal of the chromatic order: the Harlemite Disher marries the haughty daughter of the clan leader Reverend Givens (after she had spurned him as a black man in a Harlem club) becoming part of upper class Atlanta society, while the dicty race leaders of Harlem find it rather more difficulty to replicate their social standing once they pass into the white world. The white supremacists attempt to make the Black-No-More business the burning issue of a presidential campaign – parodying of the extent to which US politics always already turns on the race question. This backfires on the Knights and their associates as the whitest of the white – Mr Arthur Snobbcraft and Dr Samuel Buggerie – are discovered to have African American ancestors and, after falling into the hands of a militant redneck community (while wearing blackface, just to add to the absurdity), they are lynched. Eventually scientific research indicates that those who have undergone the Black-No-More treatment are, in fact, whiter than their former oppressors and the novel closes with the proliferation of beauty salons offering skin darkening techniques (Poudre Negre, Poudre Le Egyptienne and the like) and calls for the segregation of the palest.

Much of Schuyler’s satire turns on the extent to which the race problem in the US cloaks economic oppression. He goes further, however, to suggest that the celebration of African American culture in Harlem during the 1920s is no more than an extension of white economic dominance. When all are white the supposedly authentic arts of African American culture, the blues and jazz and the spirituals, as well as the nightclubs, theatres and churches that gave them home, disappear in the stampede to flee the economic ghettoisation of blackness. Schuyler calls into question the race loyalties of the New Negro movement as he satirises its major figures (from Garvey to Du Bois to Locke); revealing them as craven cowards or pretentious buffoons who are as keen as the next man or woman to take the path to chromatic indistinction. In this respect Schuyler’s novel is of a piece with that other satire of 1932, Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring – often cited as the death knell of the New Negro movement – in that both texts seek to puncture the pretentions of New Negro Africanism and each questions the assumptions about black authenticity that underpin claims to a uniquely African American art (Thurman, 1932). Schuyler’s novel moves beyond mere spleen at New Negro leaders, however, in that he seeks to question the idea that there might be any such thing as an essence of blackness that can be claimed as uniquely and unequivocally African American (see also Schuyler, 1926). His astute assessment is that much of the cultural anxiety surrounding racial mixing – and the extent to which this is projected onto women – represents eugenic tendencies that differ from his satirical vision only in terms of degree. Appropriately the Black-No-More enterprise runs into trouble when it transpires that there is no guarantee of the genetic conference of whiteness: making reproduction a risky game of chance for any former African American – a neat parallel of concerns among well-to-do African Americans about the risks of having a ‘dark’ baby.

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