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Ignorance
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Black No More, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Many of the characters in Black No More lie about or misrepresent their identities. For example, many Black characters take the Black-No-More treatment and turn white, taking on new personas. Other characters throughout the book misrepresent their racial makeup—whether to exaggerate their white heritage or their Black heritage. Some are simply unaware of the truth about their identity, like the many white characters with Black ancestry who do not realize this fact until the end of the novel, despite their security in being “pure.” Given these deceptions, Schuyler suggests that no one can be fully secure in their identity or define themselves purely by a skin color or bloodline.
Black Americans who take the Black-No-More treatment deceive others as they often fabricate new names and identities, showing how difficult it is to fully express or understand the truth about their identities now that skin color has become so malleable. Max, the book’s protagonist, takes on a new identity after turning white, calling himself Matthew Fisher rather than Max Disher. He notes that he no longer feels like he belongs in Black American society. And yet, as he confides to his friend Bunny, he knows he’s Black and he’s “always on the alert” as a result. In this way, Max is deceiving others but doesn’t feel fully settled in any given identity because his bloodline and his skin are at odds with one another. Later, when Max marries a white woman, Helen, and is expecting a child with her, he feels guilty about keeping his identity from his wife. “An angel of frankness beckoned him to be done with this life of pretense,” and he does eventually reveal the truth to her just after their mixed-race son, Matthew Jr., is born. Even then, Max continues to go by Matthew, and he and Helen leave the United States with Matthew Jr. This demonstrates that Max knows he was deceiving his wife, but even after giving up the “pretense,” he still struggles to fully understand his identity. Moreover, he may not ever be able to understand himself in the context of the United States’ difficult race relations.
Yet as much as the Black characters actively deceive others about their race, the book also suggests that the white characters are deceiving others as well, because many of them have Black ancestry. In other words, no one knows the full truth about their identity, nor can it solely be defined by race or bloodline. Characters like Reverend Givens and Arthur Snobbcraft pride themselves on having “pure” white ancestry, and they start social organizations and become a part of political movements based in white supremacy. But at the end of the novel, a statistician’s research reveals that Givens, Snobbcraft, and several other prominent white supremacist figures have Black ancestry. The men are shocked to learn this: Givens even uses a racial slur and says that they’re all Black people now. Givens’s identity hasn’t changed—his use of this slur illustrates that he’s still racist despite his heritage—but it shows how arbitrary and ultimately deceptive skin color and bloodline can be. Givens’s daughter, Helen, realizes this as well. When she learns of this heritage and Max’s deception—just moments after she gives birth to her and Max’s baby—she is relieved rather than angry about Max’s deception. “Compared to what she possessed,” thinks Helen, “all talk of race and color [is] damned foolishness.” She recognizes that no one can be truly secure in their identity, and therefore, fixating on it is useless.
Several Black civil rights leaders, even before the emergence of Black-No-More, manipulate their identities to benefit their public images, illustrating another way in which skin color or bloodline can change people’s perception of a person’s identity but have no bearing on their actual identity. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, the founder of the National Social Equality League, is a graduate of Harvard and Yale and often speaks at white banquets about “we of the black race.” However, he also states that he is part French, part Russian, part Native American, and part Black. The book notes that he discusses the plights of average Black workers “with whose lives he was totally and thankfully unfamiliar.” In this way, the book critiques him for aligning himself with an experience he doesn’t have, and the book suggests again that factors like skin color or bloodline don’t fully capture identity. The book gives another example in Walter Williams, a white man who is a part of the National Social Equality League because his great-grandfather was a mixed-race man. He says that he is “proud” to be Black, but later, after the N.S.E.L. disbands, he goes “back to the white race.” Again, the book suggests that white and Black racial identities are not fixed; they can be manipulated and unstable, and as such, these definitions of bloodline and skin color become meaningless.
Dr. Crookman (the creator of Black-No-More) and Samuel Buggerie’s research both put a scientific point on this argument. Crookman’s research illustrates that more than 80 percent of Black Americans have white ancestry, while Buggerie’s research shows that more than 50 million Americans have Black ancestry. In 1931, when Black No More was published, the U.S. population was about 122 million with 108 million white Americans and 11 million Black Americans, suggesting that more than one third of white Americans at the time had Black ancestry.) This data illustrates that, in reality, focusing on blood or skin color to determine identity is confusing and pointless, as very few people are as “pure” as they think they are, and almost no one has a full picture of their identity.
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Identity and Deception ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Identity and Deception appears in each chapter of Black No More. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Identity and Deception Quotes in Black No More
Below you will find the important quotes in Black No More related to the theme of Identity and Deception.
Chapter 1
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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.
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Chapter 2
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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?
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Chapter 8
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“What’s got my goat is my wife being in the family way.” Matthew stopped bantering a moment, a sincere look of pain erasing his usual ironic expression.
“Congratulations!” burbled Bunny.
“Don’t rub it in,” Matthew replied. “You know how the kid will look.”
“That’s right,” agreed his pal. “You know, sometimes I forget who we are.”
“Well, I don’t. I know I’m a darky and I’m always on the alert.”
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Chapter 11
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“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!
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Chapter 12
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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.
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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.”
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Chapter 13
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This section of the state had been untouched by the troubles through which the rest of the South had gone as a result of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated. The people for miles around were with very few exceptions old residents and thence known to be genuine blue-blooded Caucasians for as far back as any resident could remember which was at least fifty years. The people were proud of this fact. They were more proud, however, of the fact that Happy Hill was the home and birthplace of the True Faith Christ Lovers’ Church, which made the prodigious boast of being the most truly Fundamentalist of all the Christian sects in the United States. Other things of which the community might have boasted were its inordinately high illiteracy rate and its lynching record—but these things were seldom mentioned, although no one was ashamed of them.
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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.
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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.
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