The Black Anti-Utopia

Abstract

September 6, 1977: Today's newspaper brings notice of the death of George S. Schuyler-conservative journalist, reactionary scourge of the Civil Rights Movement, defender of European colonialism in Africa, and author of novel about American racial attitudes that is almost ignored by critics of Black literature. Schuyler's political views require no comment. History has made them irrelevant. His novel Black No More, I however, deserves to recalled, for it is rare example in Black American literature of the minor genre of the anti-utopia. The classic form of utopia in literature presents comprehensive model of the good society, usually represented through the device of visitor's inspection of institutional arrangements. The author's motive for imagining the utopian social world is simply the desire to show how life might organized according to the principle of ought to be rather than is. Through the comprehensive representation of social life, writers of fully-developed literary utopias attempt to account for historical contingency at its source by applying functional rationality, according to principles of universal justice and psychological consistency in human beings, to the organization of experience so that human life may set on predictable course. The obverse of the literary utopia derives from common sense conservatism that dreads the plan for order because it mistrusts the power of rationality. Yet anti-utopians do have faith in predictable behavior, demonstrable, they believe, in their certainty that human beings possess core of strivingslove or envy, truth or dissemblance-that must always frustrate the conditioning utopians prescribe. In formal literary terms, the anti-utopia may as comprehensive as the utopia, providing detailed portrayal of the whole range of human social life; but the conservative motive of anti-utopia colors the representation with tone of ridicule. In short, whereas the literary utopia is idyllic prophecy of the promised land, anti-utopia is akin to the satire of Jonathan Swift's flying island. 2 The quality of ridicule in Black No More was blatantly apparent when the book appeared at the close of the Harlem Renaissance. Though the artistic achievements of the period are not explicitly introduced into the narrative, many proponents and institutions of racial advancement appear in thin disguises. There are Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard (DuBois), head of the National Social Equality League; Napoleon Wellington Jackson (James Weldon Johnson); Walter Williams (Walter White); various presidents of colleges, such as Dunbar University and Dusky River Agricultural Institute; and one Dr. Joseph Bonds (Horace Mann Bond). Ali of these characters are pretentious or possess minds befuddled by the social scientific learning Schuyler despises. Then, too, there is Sisseretta Blandish, who specializes in skin whitening and hair straightening, until Dr. Junius Crookman's formula for whitening skins makes color socially desirable, whereupon she goes into the business of staining skins, under her new name of Sara Blandine. Understandably, such ridicule, in the context of narrative in which Blacks eagerly deny their * visible identity, raised hackles, but what is one to make of the book, taken as whole? Is it, as Charles R. Larson (who provides an introduction for the Collier paperback reprint) says, a plea for assimilation, for mediocrity, for reduplication, for faith in the (white) American dream? 3 Certainly the premise of Schuyler's satire is that color has no reality apart from the socially created one, and to that extent culture is an historical accident that would modified if color-