Rather Be Reading

“He had undergone the tortures of Doc Crookman’s devilish machine in order to escape the conspicuous-ness of a dark skin and now he was being made conspicuous because he had once had a dark skin! Could one never escape the plagued race problem?”

I’d rather be reading Black No More by George Schuyler instead of making sure I get enough sleep for my early shift tomorrow.

Published in 1931, this Harlem Renaissance novel considers what would happen if Black people could be turned into White people. After being rejected by a beautiful White girl from visiting from Atlanta, Max Disher – Black Harlem native, decides to become White. Max is the first to undergo a new and painful scientific transformation and becomes Matthew Fisher. His life changes completely, as he can go to certain parties and congregate with groups of White people without being detected. He even joins forces to become the leader of a white supremacist group in Atlanta and marries the pretty white girl who rejected him.

But Matthew isn’t the only Black person to abandon their race and, before you know it, the population of Black Americans is only a couple thousand. White supremacists are enraged, the South demands that the transformations cease, and Max… er… Matthew is behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can’t beat them, turn into them.

This became one of my all-time favorite books after it was introduced to me by my African American Literature professor. The satire plays on the race problems that Black people have faced since the conception of the notion of the Black person. Schuyler shows how race functions as an obsession and a commodity in America, so much to the point that as the Black population “whitens,” the “elite White” population now must scramble to differentiate and maintain their economic and pure social status.

I mean, if a black person can undergo a change of skin color and hair color and be white, no internal changes required, then there are no inherent differences between the two races, right?