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Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Black No More, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Oppression
Race, Class, and Power
Ignorance
Identity and Deception
Leadership and Hypocrisy
Summary
Analysis
Several mornings later, Matthew tells Bunny about an idea to save the South from the Republicans. Givens will get on the radio once a week, appealing to the American people to call on the Republican administration to close up Crookman’s sanitarians and deport everyone connected with Black-No-More. They’ll also denounce the Republicans and connect them with the Pope and Black-No-More. Matthew has one more idea in addition, but he’s keeping it a surprise.
The idea to have Rev. Givens give these radio addresses again illustrates the idea that he’ll be able to manipulate people by spewing lies that they aren’t knowledgeable enough to dispute—like tying Republicans, Catholicism, and Black-No-More together. This again shows the danger of ignorance, as ignorant people can be easily swayed.
Themes
Rev. Givens starts his sermons the following Thursday on a popular Atlanta program. Givens talks for more than an hour and says absolutely nothing true. He discusses the foundations of the republic, anthropology, Christianity, curbing Bolshevism, denouncing science, and he spends a large amount of time criticizing Black-No-More and calling on the Republican president Harold Goosie to deport the men leading it.
The resulting unrest from Givens’s speech soon prompts action in Washington. A few weeks later, Goosie announces that he is appointing a commission of leading citizens to study Black-No-More thoroughly and to make recommendations. Congress approves $100,000 to cover the Commission’s cost. He then appoints five Republicans and two Democrats to the Commission—mostly politicians out of a job.
The president immediately calls for a commission to investigate Black-No-More after Givens’s address, which shows how powerful Givens’s manipulation is. Even though he said nothing true, the influence he had over ignorant people enabled him to influence the government.
Themes
The Commission tours the country and inspects all the sanitariums and lying-in hospitals. They take hundreds of depositions and drink large quantities of liquor. Two months later, they issue a preliminary report pointing out that the sanitariums are operating within the law. They recommend minor changes in the marriage laws to prevent intermarriage, more competent district attorneys, the closer supervision of dance halls and cabarets, and censorship of books and movies. Two months later, they come out with a full report that exactly nine people read.
The Commission’s report ironically shows that very few people are actually interested in informing themselves on the issue or figuring out ways to solve the economic and social crisis. Instead, people would rather continue to focus on racial differences, because doing so is an easy way to scapegoat others and create social hierarchies.
Themes
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Matthew receives praise for forcing the government to take action, and now he’s ready for his next trick. He tells Bunny about Anglo-Saxon Association of America, a group who can trace back their ancestry almost 200 years, but who don’t like the Knights of Nordica because they think the Knights are all morons. However, the Association has the money to win the next presidential election. He plans to meet with them in the hopes of joining the two organizations.
The Anglo-Saxon association, positions itself as being at odds with the Knights of Nordica, but in reality, it’s very similar. Both organizations use white supremacy and racial resentment in order to gain political power and wealth.
Themes
Matthew meets with Arthur Snobbcraft, the President of the Anglo-Saxon Association. Snobbcraft strongly supports the sterilization of Black people, immigrants, and Jews, he has created numerous racial integrity laws, and he hates democracy. He wants to get a genealogical law on the books disenfranchising all people of Black or unknown ancestry. Matthew knows that this law would never be passed, but to have any hope of passing it, they would need to win the national election. The directors of the Anglo-Saxon Association realize that they can furnish the money for the campaign, and the Knights of Nordica can provide votes.
Arthur Snobbcraft is yet another example of a person who wants to maintain racial division for the purpose of oppressing others and elevating himself. Matthew, meanwhile, wants to take advantage of this prejudice to bolster his own political and financial power. Even though he knows a genealogical law would never pass, he still takes advantage of this hatred in order to get what he wants.
Themes
All parties depart the meeting in high spirits. Back in Richmond, Mr. Snobbcraft and the other directors meet with a New York statistician named Samuel Buggerie, who is highly respected for creating elaborate charts to prove widely accepted ideas like rich people have smaller families than the poor, that imprisonment doesn’t stop crime, and that laborers migrate in the wake of high wages.
Buggerie’s work isn’t far off from Joseph Bonds. In this sense, the book critiques Black and white elites alike for using studies of racism to bolster their own wealth and power without trying to remedy those kinds of social injustices.
Themes
Buggerie is nervous, bald, and a descendent of one of the First Families of Virginia. He claims the best way to tell pure whites from imitation whites is to study family trees. He tells Snobbcraft that there are almost 20 million people in the United States who possess a non-Nordic genealogical strain and are therefore unfit for citizenship and procreation. With the right funds, he can produce statistics that would be so shocking that the Republicans would lose the country unless they adopted the Democratic plank of genealogical examinations to determine whether a person can vote. The directors vote to give him the funds.
Again, even when people are all functionally the same race, people like Buggerie are still trying to get others to fixate on race and underscore people’s differences based on bloodline. But ironically, as his preliminary research already alludes to, there are a lot more people in the United States with mixed-race heritage than he thought. This suggests that most people don’t have a clear picture of their identity, and that identity can’t be solely defined by bloodline or skin color.
Themes
