Black No More: Being an Account of the
Strange and Wonderful Workings of
Science in the LandGeorge Schuyler(1931)
A scathing satire by GEORGE SCHUYLER about
race, white privilege, and many African-American
political organizations and leading figures that ap-
peared at the midway point of the Harlem Renais-
sance. Schuyler spared no one in this aggressive
and scandalous story about a doctor who has in-
vented “Black No More,” a treatment that trans-
forms skin color, and the hopeful dark-skinned
people who flock to use this remedy to succeed in
the color-conscious, segregated worlds in which
they live. The novel is dedicated to “all Caucasians
in the great republic who can trace their ancestry
back ten generations and confidently assert that
there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches
on their family trees.”
The main characters include Dr. Junius
Crookman, the “Black No More” inventor; Max
Disher, the young black man who uses the treat-
ment to marry a white southern girl and take ad-
vantage of white anxieties about race; and Bunny
Brown, Disher’s friend and the person who marries
the last “real” black girl in America. Other charac-
ters, such as Shakespeare A. Beard, Santop
Licorice, and Sissereta Blandish are caricatures
that are clearly based on leading political figures
such as W. E. B. DUBOIS,MARCUSGARVEY, and
Madame C. J. Walker, respectively.
The novel opens as Max Disher watches an
interracial crowd enter a nightclub to celebrate
New Year’s Eve. Disher, the ultimate observer, is
quickly subjected to the narrator’s scrutiny as he
laments the fact that he has no date with whom to
celebrate the holiday. Described as a “tall, dapper”
man with “smooth coffee-brown” skin, Disher also
has “negroid features [with] a slightly satanic cast”
to them, and there is an “insolent nonchalance
about his carriage.” Bunny Brown, a fellow World
War I veteran who now works as a bank teller,
joins him. Both men, who are known among their
Harlem peers as “gay blades,” share three prefer-
ences that the narrator insists are “essential to the
happiness of a colored gentleman: yellow money,
yellow women and yellow taxis.” While Disher
vows to date dark-skinned women now that he has
suffered so at Minnie’s hands, Bunny calls his at-
tention to a “tall, titian-haired girl who had seem-
ingly stepped from heaven or the front cover of a
magazine.” Unfortunately, he suffers the double in-
sult of being rejected by Minnie, his “high ‘yallah’
flapper” girlfriend, and by Helen Givens, the stun-
ning white woman from ATLANTAhe sees in the
cabaret. Frustrated by the desire whom people like
Helen have for frequenting African-American
venues, but casting aspersions on the people of
color with whom they come into contact there,
Disher agrees to try the innovative Black No More
treatment that Bunny has learned about in the
newspaper.
Disher, motivated by images of a new life and
social opportunities, makes sure that he is the first
man in Harlem to be treated in the newly opened
clinic. He arrives well ahead of the 4,000 people
who eventually converge on the Dr. Crookman’s
offices. The process, which involves a “formidable
apparatus” that requires he be lashed to a chair
that “resembled a cross between a dentist’s chair
and an electric chair,” frightens him, but once he is
manhandled into the unit by “two husky atten-
dants,” he realizes that there is “no retreat. It was
either the beginning or the end.” Transformed into
a white-skinned person, he is a new man, one for
whom whiteness now meant “no more expendi-
tures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination;
no more obstacles in his path. He was free! The
world was his oyster and he had the open sesame
of a pork-colored skin!” Disher changes his name
to Fisher and heads south in search of Helen.
While the narrative follows the evolution of
Disher, it also attends to the impact that the
whitening process has upon Dr. Crookman, the son
of an Episcopal clergyman, and his wife, who
“though poor, were proud and boasted that they be-
longed to the Negro aristocracy.” Crookman is a
scholarly and political man, one who “prided him-
self above all on being a great lover of his race.” His
invention is part of his plan to enact modern eman-
cipation, and he is motivated by his philosophy that
“if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro
problem. Without a Negro problem, Americans
could concentrate their attention on something
constructive.” Crookman, who is married to a
“white girl with remote Negro ancestry, of the type
that Negroes were wont to describe as being ‘able
to pass for white,’” believes that his Black No More
process is not solely about racial aesthetics. He is44 Black No More