"Science would succeed where the Civil War had failed"
In George Schuyler’s Black No More, Max Fisher makes the comment that “science would succeed where the Civil War had failed.” The scientists who created Black No More Inc. believed that all racial problems would disappear as soon as exterior color was taken out of the equation, however they couldn’t have been more wrong. The book soon proved that racism is more then skin deep. There was mass hysteria among the white community when it became possible for white women to be tricked into marrying black men and then unknowingly have mulatto children. If the white community believed that black people were so inferior to white people then wouldn’t it still be easy to tell them apart, even if they looked the same? What are they afraid of then? It certainly wasn’t the skin color; in the end everyone tries to darken their skin in fear of the ultra white race. It couldn’t be that they were afraid of people being different; everyone looked the same. I believe that it’s about superiority. The white race wanted to feel better then someone else. The poor southerners could at least be better then the black population. The black race wanted equality; they wanted to be the same as the white race to have equal opportunities. Black No More Inc. leveled the playing field, now you had to work to be better then someone else.
posted by Malen at 4:00 PM
5 Comments:
You raise a really interesting point about the white race "having to work" for the superiority once simply bestowed upon them by genetics. I think this, more than anything, fueled racism; the belief that one race is better than another came from a *desire* to be better. What I mean to say is that the more the white race *wanted* to believe in their superiority, the more they came to believe that this superiority actually existed - a self fulfilling prophecy, of sorts.
Looking at the quote, I was wondering what exactly was meant by “where the civil war had failed.” For the south, the civil war failed in separating the nation, thus keeping blacks is subordinate positions. For the north, despite winning the war, the failure was in creating equality between the races. Looking at this quote as the slogan of Black No More Inc, it refers to the latter, that this machine would eliminate any remaining attempts to claim racial superiority, since everyone will be the same race. Once everyone is the same race, though, people begin finding different ways to determine people’s racial history. However, what if at some point in the future, everyone in the real world has become some composite race, such that we are all of equal mixtures of races from around the world. What will people look for to claim superiority? Is it human nature to find superficial characteristics to judge each other? Personally, I think that it is human nature to search for easy ways to judge one another, since I think that naturally there are several flaws in each human, judgment being one of many.
I think a level playing is what scares the American public. We would like to think that the various efforts made to give all races and ethnicities an equal opportunity to acheive the "American dream"; however, it is obvious that although we have made progress, there is still a long way to go. I agree with you that the white people in Schuyler's novel were shocked to learn that they had to work equally as hard to be better than the black folks--white privilege no longer holds when the black people are whiter than you. I also think that the white people in the novel continued to seek for race issues to deal with because the idea of equality with blacks caused them great anxiety.
I agree with Maxine in that it is very interesting how the white people in Black No More realize, once the black race is almost entirely wiped out, that their "superiority" can no longer exist. This seems to shock them and it is interesting that in the end, when people realize that the "blacks turned Caucasian" are actually more white than "real" white people, the "real" white people decide to go darker. It is as if any association with a black person, even if they are now white, is considered wrong.
I agree that racism was not solely based on an irrational belief that having dark skin made you inferior to a person with white skin. Whites enjoyed significant economic and political gains from enforcing racism, and thus maintaining the old racial order was definitely in their interests. For this reason there was no celebration when all the blacks in the country disappeared (in addition to the new possibility of a new race of mulatto babies).
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