Black No More illustrates that much of the United States’ political and financial hierarchies are based in stoking racial division. For example, white politicians in the book fundraise and run on the promise of keeping white society racially pure; Dr. Crookman makes thousands of dollars on a treatment that makes Black people more like white people; and Max Disher, a Black character who turns white, use the white working class’s hatred of Black workers to make himself rich by joining a hate group called the Knights of Nordica. Meanwhile, poor Black and white workers can’t recognize their inferior social position is a result of class because these elites are dividing them based on race. By demonstrating how Black and white elites both use racism to gain power and money, the book suggests that racism is a tool for shifting money and power toward elites while keeping the working classes from uniting to take the money and power they deserve.
Throughout the book, wealthy white supremacists use racism to bolster their own wealth and power. Before the beginning of the novel, Rev. Givens works for the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan and takes advantage of its members by siphoning off some of the treasury for himself so that he can retire. Then, when Dr. Crookman creates the Black-No-More treatment that can turn Black Americans white, Givens starts the Knights of Nordica. While he believes in the mission to “fight for white race integrity,” his real aim in founding the organization is to have a “full treasury to dip into.” Thus, he preys upon this fear among white people that Black people are infiltrating their race in order to bolster his own wealth. In a way, Max—who is the first person to receive Dr. Crookman’s treatment—does the same thing. After he turns white, he joins the Knights of Nordica, though he has “no belief in the racial integrity nonsense,” and only planned to use the white working classes as “a stepladder to the real money.” Thus, the book demonstrates how even Black people who have turned white, like Max, use racism to profit themselves even at the expense of Black or formerly Black people like himself.
White leaders are not the only ones taking advantage of the working class, as the book also demonstrates how Black elites also use racism to gain wealth. Although Dr. Crookman claims that he just wants to remove obstacles from his fellow Black Americans in creating Black-No-More, he also makes an enormous amount of money while creating chaos and division in the Black community. At the end of the book, he comes out with a study showing that his treatment made people several shades whiter than “pure” white people, lighting the fire anew on racial discrimination. Thus, even though he theoretically wants to prevent discrimination, his treatment doesn’t actually eradicate it, and he upends Black society while earning his fortune. Even Dr. Crookman’s very name suggests that his motivations may not be as pure as he states, as it hints that he’s a “crook,” or a morally crooked person. The book also critiques many other Black leaders who use racism to take advantage of the Black masses, like those who are a part of the National Social Equality League. The book states, “While the large staff of officials was eager to end all oppression and persecution of the Negro, they were never so happy and excited as when a Negro was barred from a theater or fried to a crisp” because this would increase support for their organization and lead to more funds and bigger salaries for them. In this way, the book takes an extremely cynical view of these leaders, who see the advantage to be had in using racism as a way to make money.
Not only do Black and white elites use racism to take money from the working classes, but they also use racial hatred to divide the working classes and thwart them from gaining political and economic power. Even before the beginning of the book, businessmen use racism to prevent labor organization. White workers often blame Black workers for taking their jobs because they do the same work for less money. The businessmen and newspapers “fan[] the color prejudice of the white people” so that the white working class gives “little thought to labor organization,” even though organizing with Black Americans would ultimately help them. In this way, playing up racial divisions prevents workers from unionizing and building collective power that could earn them all better wages and working conditions. Then, after Black people begin undergoing Dr. Crookman’s treatment, Max realizes that he has to ensure that this prejudice continues, even at the expense of the workers, many of whom are part of the Knights of Nordica. First, he extorts two factory managers to guarantee them that he can prevent the Knights there from unionizing. He accomplishes this by spreading rumors that the leader of the factory’s labor movement used to be Black. As a result, they refuse to work with him, and the labor movement dissolves. The book explains, “The erstwhile class conscious workers became terror-stricken by the specter of black blood.” This episode illustrates both of the key dynamics at play between race and class in the book. First, that elites (like Max) take advantage of the working classes to bolster their own wealth and power; and second, that forcing the working classes to focus on race rather than class consciousness prevents them from attaining the benefits they deserve.
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Race, Class, and Power Quotes in Black No More
As the cab whirled up Seventh Avenue, he settled back and thought of the girl from Atlanta. He couldn’t get her out of his mind and didn’t want to. At his rooming house, he paid the driver, unlocked the door, ascended to his room and undressed, mechanically. His mind was a kaleidoscope: Atlanta, sea-green eyes, slender figure, titian hair, frigid manner. “I never dance with niggers.” Then he fell asleep about five o’clock and promptly dreamed of her. Dreamed of dancing with her, dining with her, motoring with her, sitting beside her on a golden throne while millions of manacled white slaves prostrated themselves before him. Then there was a nightmare of grim, gray men with shotguns, baying hounds, a heap of gasoline-soaked faggots and a screeching, fanatical mob.
Madame Sisseretta Blandish sat disconsolately in an armchair near the front door of her ornate hair-straightening shop, looking blankly at the pedestrians and traffic passing to and fro. These two weeks had been hard ones for her. Everything was going out and nothing coming in. She had been doing very well at her vocation for years and was acclaimed in the community as one of its business leaders. Because of her prominence as the proprietor of a successful enterprise engaged in making Negroes appear as much like white folks as possible, she had recently been elected for the fourth time a Vice-President of the American Race Pride League.
The attitude of these people puzzled him. Was not Black-No-More getting rid of the Negroes upon whom all of the blame was placed for the backwardness of the South? Then he recalled what a Negro street speaker had said one night on the corner of 138th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York: that unorganized labor meant cheap labor; that the guarantee of cheap labor was an effective means of luring new industries into the South; that so long as the ignorant white masses could be kept thinking of the menace of the Negro to Caucasian race purity and political control, they would give little thought to labor organization. It suddenly dawned upon Matthew Fisher that this Black-No-More treatment was more of a menace to white business than to white labor. And not long afterward he became aware of the money-making possibilities involved in the present situation.
Unlike Givens, he had no belief in the racial integrity nonsense nor any confidence in the white masses whom he thought were destined to flock to the Knights of Nordica. On the contrary he despised and hated them. He had the average Negro’s justifiable fear of the poor whites and only planned to use them as a stepladder to the real money.
Matthew, who sat on the platform alongside old man Givens viewed the spectacle with amusement mingled with amazement. He was amused because of the similarity of this meeting to the religious orgies of the more ignorant Negroes and amazed that earlier in the evening he should have felt any qualms about lecturing to these folks on anthropology, a subject with which neither he nor his hearers were acquainted. He quickly saw that these people would believe anything that was shouted at them loudly and convincingly enough. He knew what would fetch their applause and bring in their memberships and he intended to repeat it over and over.
For an hour Matthew told them at the top of his voice what they believed: i.e., that a white skin was a sure indication of the possession of superior intellectual and moral qualities; that all Negroes were inferior to them; that God had intended for the United States to be a white man’s country and that with His help they could keep it so; that their sons and brothers might inadvertently marry Negresses or, worse, their sisters and daughters might marry Negroes, if Black-No-More, Incorporated, was permitted to continue its dangerous activities.
While this organization had to depend to a large extent upon the charity of white folk for its existence, since the blacks had always been more or less skeptical about the program for liberty and freedom, the efforts of the society were not entirely unprofitable. Vistas of immaculate offices spread in every direction from the elevator and footfalls were muffled in thick imitation-Persian rugs. While the large staff of officials was eager to end all oppression and persecution of the Negro, they were never so happy and excited as when a Negro was barred from a theater or fried to a crisp. Then they would leap for telephones, grab telegraph pads and yell for stenographers; smiling through their simulated indignation at the spectacle of another reason for their continued existence and appeals for funds.
In a very private inner office of the N. S. E. L. suite, Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, founder of the League and a graduate of Harvard, Yale and Copenhagen (whose haughty bearing never failed to impress both Caucasians and Negroes), sat before a glass-topped desk, rubbing now his curly gray head, and now his full spade beard. For a mere six thousand dollars a year, the learned doctor wrote scholarly and biting editorials in The Dilemma denouncing the Caucasians whom he secretly admired and lauding the greatness of the Negroes whom he alternately pitied and despised. In limpid prose he told of the sufferings and privations of the down-trodden black workers with whose lives he was totally and thankfully unfamiliar. Like most Negro leaders, he deified the black woman but abstained from employing aught save octoroons. He talked at white banquets about “we of the black race” and admitted in books that he was part-French, part-Russian, part-Indian and part-Negro. He bitterly denounced the Nordics for debauching Negro women while taking care to hire comely yellow stenographers with weak resistance. In a real way he loved his people.
Mr. Licorice for some fifteen years had been very profitably advocating the emigration of all the American Negroes to Africa. He had not, of course, gone there himself and had not the slightest intention of going so far from the fleshpots, but he told the other Negroes to go. Naturally the first step in their going was to join his society by paying five dollars a year for membership, ten dollars for a gold, green and purple robe and silver-colored helmet that together cost two dollars and a half, contributing five dollars to the Santop Licorice Defense Fund […], and buying shares at five dollars each in the Royal Black Steamship Company, for obviously one could not get to Africa without a ship and Negroes ought to travel on Negro-owned and operated ships. The ships were Santop’s especial pride. True, they had never been to Africa, had never had but one cargo and that, being gin, was half consumed by the unpaid and thirsty crew before the vessel was saved by the Coast Guard, but they had cost more than anything else the Back-To-Africa Society had purchased even though they were worthless except as scrap iron.
The great mass of white workers, however, was afraid to organize and fight for more pay because of a deepset fear that the Negroes would take their jobs. They had heard of black labor taking the work of white labor under the guns of white militia, and they were afraid to risk it. They had first read of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated, with a secret feeling akin to relief but after the orators of the Knights of Nordica and the editorials of The Warning began to portray the menace confronting them, they forgot about their economic ills and began to yell for the blood of Dr. Crookman and his associates. Why, they began to argue, one couldn’t tell who was who! Herein lay the fundamental cause of all their ills. Times were hard, they reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living. None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them. So they flocked to the meetings of the Knights of Nordica and night after night sat spellbound while Rev. Givens, who had finished the eighth grade in a one-room country school, explained the laws of heredity and spoke eloquently of the growing danger of black babies.
The erstwhile class conscious workers became terror-stricken by the specter of black blood. You couldn’t, they said, be sure of anybody any more, and it was better to leave things as they were than to take a chance of being led by some nigger. If the colored gentry couldn’t sit in the movies and ride in the trains with white folks, it wasn’t right for them to be organizing and leading white folks.
Rev. Givens, fortified with a slug of corn, advanced nervously to the microphone, fingering his prepared address. He cleared his throat and talked for upwards of an hour during which time he successfully avoided saying anything that was true, the result being that thousands of telegrams and long- distance telephone calls of congratulation came in to the studio. In his long address he discussed the foundations of the Republic, anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, curbing Bolshevism, the bane of birth control, the menace of the Modernists, science versus religion, and many other subjects of which he was totally ignorant. The greater part of his time was taken up in a denunciation of Black-No-More, Incorporated, and calling upon the Republican administration of President Harold Goosie to deport the vicious Negroes at the head of it or imprison them in the federal penitentiary. When he had concluded “In the name of our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, Amen,” he retired hastily to the washroom to finish his half-pint of corn.
One Sunday morning Surgeon-General Crookman, in looking over the rotogravure section of his favorite newspaper, saw a photograph of a happy crowd of Americans arrayed in the latest abbreviated bathing suits on the sands at Cannes. In the group he recognized Hank Johnson, Chuck Foster, Bunny Brown and his real Negro wife, former Imperial Grand Wizard and Mrs. Givens and Matthew and Helen Fisher. All of them, he noticed, were quite as dusky as little Matthew Crookman Fisher, who played in a sandpile at their feet.
Dr. Crookman smiled wearily and passed the section to his wife.
