Black No More begins in 1933 when Dr. Junius Crookman, a Black scientist, discovers a treatment to turn Black Americans white by changing their skin color, hair, and other features. Among the thousands and then millions of Black Americans who get the treatment, there is no discernible difference between them and people who were born white. Crookman thus illustrates that any distinction in physical appearance is superficial—a radical idea at the time, as white people had long believed that they were biologically superior and discriminated against others based on this difference. But by the end of the book, even though differences between Black and white have been eradicated, people are still obsessed with race and determining who is “Black” and “white.” The book thus illustrates two key points: first, that race is no more than a malleable difference in skin color; and second, that even though race is just a construct, American’s fixation on it is so inescapable that it doesn’t even end when virtually everyone is the same race.
Dr. Crookman’s research on race, and the fact that Black Americans can become fully integrated by taking his treatment, establishes that race is superficially constructed. When discussing his treatment with reporters, Dr. Crookman states that “Black-No-More” can help “solve the American race problem” because it makes Black people indistinguishable from white people, suggesting that skin color and a few other superficial physical features are the only things that distinguish races. When a journalist questions Johnson about whether the treatment changes people’s voices, he emphasizes that a Black man “speaks the same dialect as his white neighbors.” He also points out that many people—both Black and white—have mixed ancestry, and so there aren’t actually that many biological differences between Black and white people. The book’s protagonist, Max, experiences this firsthand after undergoing the treatment. He easily blends into white society, and he thinks, “As a boy he had been taught to look up to white folks as just a little less than gods; now he found them little different” from Black Americans. In this way, the book emphasizes that any differences between the races have only come out of power imbalances, not any inherent differences.
Yet even when Black Americans become fully integrated into white society (often unbeknownst to white people), white people still try to seek out differences between the races, demonstrating how fixated society is on race. One difference that alarms white people is the fact that Dr. Crookman’s treatment does not affect people’s genes, and therefore babies are still born Black or mixed-race. Dr. Crookman is easily able to use the treatment on babies as well, but white people become very alarmed at the prospect of giving birth to Black babies. This illustrates how even when given solutions to the racial divide, white people still take any opportunity to point out racial differences. As more and more Black people turn white, the “pure” white people—particularly Arthur Snobbcraft of the Anglo-Saxon Association—try to distinguish themselves from people who were formerly white. He comes up with the idea of creating genealogical tests to determine whether someone is truly white or not. However, this plan backfires, as research indicates that nearly 50 percent of the country has Black ancestry—even Snobbcraft. This discovery underscores again that race is superficial (because so many people have mixed-race ancestries), and it also shows how Americans unfailingly obsess over racial differences even when there’s little to no evidence of these differences.
The book satirizes this obsession with race even further at the end of the book, when people darken their skin color to prove they are “white,” showing not only how race is malleable, but also how people (particularly white people) unceasingly obsess over trying to maintain their idea of a superior race. At the end of the book, Dr. Crookman comes out with a report that the Black Americans who took his treatment are actually two to three shades whiter than the “pure” white people. This very fact illustrates how race is malleable and a mere construct. Even though there are differences between people, the underlying definitions of what it means to be “white” versus “Black” have become completely eradicated—so much so that “white” people no longer have the whitest skin. As a result of this discovery, people start to use makeup to darken their skin in order to paradoxically prove they are white. Even when people become ostensibly the same, Americans fixate on race in a new way as a way to differentiate people even though it is an entirely fabricated construct.
The book also explores why Americans have such a deep fixation on race. Race is an easy tool to invent hierarchy, and society craves a way of establishing and wielding power against others, even if it’s over something arbitrary. Particularly because white people are the majority and hold the power in society, they seek a way to maintain that power and thus look for differences between themselves and Black people in whatever way they can. The book thus suggests that even when given a solution to the “race problem,” people will simply find a different way to obsess over race.
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Racism and Oppression 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.
On the other hand, many so-called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic of peoples like the Swedes, show almost Negroid lips and noses. Black up some white folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin. Then when you consider that less than twenty per cent of our Negroes are without Caucasian ancestry and that close to thirty per cent have American Indian ancestry, it is readily seen that there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine.
He was annoyed and a little angered. What did they want to put his picture all over the front of the paper for? Now everybody would know who he was. He had undergone the tortures of Doc Crookman’s devilish machine in order to escape the conspicuousness 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?
There are times when the welfare of our race must take precedence over law. Opposed as we always have been to mob violence as the worst enemy of democratic government, we cannot help but feel that the intelligent white men and women of New York City who are interested in the purity and preservation of their race should not permit the challenge of Crookmanism to go unanswered, even though these black scoundrels may be within the law. There are too many criminals in this country already hiding behind the skirts of the law.
The unreasoning and illogical color prejudice of most of the people with whom he was forced to associate infuriated him. He often laughed cynically when some coarse, ignorant white man voiced his opinion concerning the inferior mentality and morality of the Negroes. He was moving in white society now and he could compare it with the society he had known as a Negro in Atlanta and Harlem. What a let-down it was from the good breeding, sophistication, refinement and gentle cynicism to which he had become accustomed as a popular young man about town in New York’s Black Belt. He was not able to articulate this feeling but he was conscious of the reaction nevertheless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other Northern newspapers assumed an even more friendly attitude, but the press generally followed the crowd, or led it, and in slightly veiled language urged the opponents of Black-No-More to take the law into their hands.
Finally, emboldened and inflamed by fiery editorials, radio addresses, pamphlets, posters and platform speeches, a mob seeking to protect white womanhood in Cincinnati attacked a Crookman hospital, drove several women into the streets and set fire to the building. A dozen babies were burned to death and others, hastily removed by their mothers, were recognized as mulattoes. The newspapers published names and addresses. Many of the women were very prominent socially either in their own right or because of their husbands.
The nation was shocked as never before. Republican sentiment began to dwindle.
“There was so much of this mixing between whites and blacks of the various classes that very early the colonies took steps to put a halt to it. They managed to prevent intermarriage but they couldn’t stop intermixture. You know the old records don’t lie. They’re right there for everybody to see…
“A certain percentage of these Negroes,” continued Buggerie, quite at ease now and seemingly enjoying his dissertation, “in time lightened sufficiently to be able to pass for white. They then merged with the general population. Assuming that there were one thousand such cases fifteen generations ago—and we have proof that there were more—their descendants now number close to fifty million souls. Now I maintain that we dare not risk publishing this information. Too many of our very first families are touched right here in Richmond!
Must he go on forever in this way? Helen was young and fecund. Surely one couldn’t go on murdering one’s children, especially when one loved and wanted children. Wouldn’t it be better to settle the matter once and for all? Or should he let the doctor murder the boy and then hope for a better situation the next time? An angel of frankness beckoned him to be done with this life of pretense; to take his wife and son and flee far away from everything, but a devil of ambition whispered seductively about wealth, power and prestige.
Helen felt a wave of relief go over her. There was no feeling of revulsion at the thought that her husband was a Negro. There once would have been but that was seemingly centuries ago when she had been unaware of her remoter Negro ancestry. She felt proud of her Matthew. She loved him more than ever. They had money and a beautiful, brown baby. What more did they need? To hell with the world! To hell with society! Compared to what she possessed, thought Helen, all talk of race and color was damned foolishness. She would probably have been surprised to learn that countless Americans at that moment were thinking the same thing.
“‘Well,” said Bunny, grinning, “it sure is good to be able to admit that you’re a jigwalk once more.”
“Yes, Bunny,” said old man Givens, “I guess we’re all niggers now.”
The crowd whooped with glee and Rev. McPhule beamed with satisfaction. The flames rose higher and completely hid the victims from view. The fire crackled merrily and the intense heat drove the spectators back. The odor of cooking meat permeated the clear, country air and many a nostril was guiltily distended. The flames subsided to reveal a red-hot stake supporting two charred hulks.
There were in the assemblage two or three whitened Negroes, who, remembering what their race had suffered in the past, would fain have gone to the assistance of the two men but fear for their own lives restrained them. Even so they were looked at rather sharply by some of the Christ Lovers because they did not appear to be enjoying the spectacle as thoroughly as the rest. Noticing these questioning glances, the whitened Negroes began to yell and prod the burning bodies with sticks and cast stones at them. This exhibition restored them to favor and banished any suspicion that they might not be one-hundred-per-cent Americans.
What was the world coming to, if the blacks were whiter than the whites? Many people in the upper class began to look askance at their very pale complexions. If it were true that extreme whiteness was evidence of the possession of Negro blood, of having once been a member of a pariah class, then surely it were well not to be so white!
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.
