Crookman's Grand Scheme in George Schuyler's Black No More

Throughout my reading of Schuyler's Black No More, a satirical speculation into what would happen if black people could be made white, I could not help but notice a particular detail. Dr. Junius Crookman is an African American physician who develops a process to whiten dark skin. However, despite the fact that he has trained other doctors to perform the procedure and opened one hundred "sanitariums" throughout the United States, Dr. Crookman never elects to go through with this procedure himself. Crookman voices the opinion that the troubles of black people in American society can only be solved by means of a color change, not through cooperation or cultural assimilation, but he remains black. Every other prominent black leader in the United States, with the exception of a few "die hards" or "race patriots," becomes white with the exception of Crookman.

While this is barely mentioned throughout the entire text, Schuyler has Crookmam make a move in the final chapter that suggests more significance. Crookman, now Surgeon General of the United States, announces that artificially white people can be differentiated from naturally white people by the fact that they are actually two or three shades lighter than those born white. After all of the chaos and confusion brought about by the whitening of blacks and the realization that even the most purportedly pure whites have some black ancestry, Crookman reinstates a racial binary. The difference with this new binary is that it is unusually pale people that are marginalized instead of people with darker skin. Consequently, people who were born white (and still clinging to racial prejudice) seek methods of differentiating themselves so that they do not appear to be too white.

The result of this social shift is a new burgeoning industry of skin staining, allowing white people to darken their skin to shades of fair brown. Schuyler refers to this new mentality as being "mulatto-minded." What is fascinating about this shift is that it takes place in a socioeconomic context much different than the old racial binary. When Crookman introduces his data on levels of whiteness, the entire country has experienced an overhaul of its roads, apartment buildings and boarding houses, and sewage systems. Schuyler makes no reference to slums or lower-class neighborhoods into which the whitest-of-the-white are segregated. Through Crookman's efforts, Schuyler has managed to take a similar path to other speculative fiction authors on the issue of race. As Sheree R. Thomas establishes, authors such as Ray Bradbury and Raplh Ellison wrote stories commenting on black invisibility, but Schuyler takes it a step farther. He takes Black No More into the realm of black disappearance and pulls it further to reach a point of black preference, a social context in which having darker skin is seen as desirable or advantageous. He has made blackness visible, and he acknowledges this with Crookman's satisfied smile at the closing of the text.