A review by kingofspain93
Black No More by George S. Schuyler

3.75

He was engaged in a most vital and necessary work: i.e., collecting bales of data to prove satisfactorily to all that more money was needed to collect more data. Most of the data were highly informative, revealing the amazing fact that poor people went to jail oftener than rich ones; that most of the people were not getting enough money for their work; that strangely enough there was some connection between poverty, disease and crime. By establishing these facts with mathematical certitude and illustrating them with elaborate graphs, Dr. Bonds garnered many fat checks.

I’m not usually a fan of satire. Generally, I think works that are marketed as satirical are not as smart as they think they are and on top of that they simply aren’t very good stories (Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, for example). That said, Black No More feels like an eruption of Schuyler’s fury and boredom written more for his own sake than anything else, like he needed to get it off his chest or go insane. In 1931 he is already exhausted by the circle-jerking on issues the american public still finds threatening today: whether or not women should have access to birth control, whether crime causes poverty or the other way around, how to define whiteness in a world where blood quantum exists and skin color is only one expression of genetics, and the (at least) correlative relationship between rampant racism and stunted class consciousness. I don’t think this needed to be a novel-length inquisition, as it starts to feel repetitive after the first two-thirds or so, but I appreciate the impulse driving it and Schuyler’s wide-ranging exploration of what it would look like if Blackness could be “cured.”

While there are very few women in Black No More, I think it is clear at a few points that Schuyler understands misogyny to be a tool of oppression equivalent to racism, policing, and labor exploitation. I also appreciate how (obviously) the Black characters are smarter and more resourceful about the post-Black No More playing field than every single white character. The only Black characters who come off badly here are those who used their supposedly equity-driven professional and academic positions for profit. They stand in contrast to Max, who gets whitened then becomes a white supremacist leader in order to make millions of dollars. Schuyler seems to be saying that it is not a problem for Black people to use whatever means necessary to get ahead, but that it is cognitive dissonance and exploitation of other Black people that he finds scummy.

To sum up, this was funny and smart but it could have been a short story or just gone unpublished. It reads like Schuyler wrote it for himself because the alternative was to go all D.C. Sniper. The man just sounds so tired and pissed off that this is the reality we rolled.

AND SO ON AND SO ON.