George Schuyler

“The Negro Art Hokum” (1926)

Black No More (1931)

George Samuel Schuyler (1895-1977)

1) Grew from a socialist to a staunch member of the Republican Party

2) A militant satirist who sought to undermine all grounds upon which people stood comfortably

-Black No More (1931)-Black Empire (1936-8)-Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia

3) Journalist, “The Negro Art Hokum” (1926), for The Nation, The Messenger, and the Pittsburgh Courier

4) While staying at the Phyllis Wheatley hotel, run by Garvey’s UNIA, he developed a fascination with socialism and began to critique Garvey

5) Dedicated to a vision of the “race problem” as one engendered by class, and not race, divisions

George S. Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Nation 122 (June 16, 1926): 662–3: Central

Arguments1) There is African Art and Africamerican art, and

the latter is merely a subset of the former.2) The notions of a separate and distinct

Africamerican art are derived from essentialist assumptions about U.S. blacks and their culture(s)

3) Africamerican Art is not the product of African racial essentialism or retentions, but of specific American circumstances

4) Art does not eschew nationalism or internationalism, but it is, foremost, the inevitable outgrowth of a collision between certain socio-economic circumstances and “talent” (as in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”).

Black No More (1931)

This book is dedicated

to all Caucasians

who can trace their ancestry

back ten generations

and confidently assert that there are no

Black leaves, twigs, or branches on

their family trees

Racism as Capitalism: Capitalism as Racism

Max put down the paper and stared vacantly out the window. Gee, Crookman would be a millionaire in no time. He’d even be a multi-millionaire. It looked as though science was to succeed where the Civil War failed. (10)

Race Pride as Capitalism: Capitalism as Race Pride

He explained and showed her a copy of The Scimitar containing his story. She switched on the light and read it. Contrasting emotions played over her face, for Mrs. Blandish was well known in the world as Mme. Sisseretta Blandish, the beauty specialist who owned a hair-straightening salon in Harlem [….]

“Well,” she sighed, “ I suppose you’re going down town to live now. I always said niggers didn’t really have any race pride..” (28)

Black Leaders Pseudonyms

National Social Equality League [N.S.E.L]=NAACP

Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard= W.E.B. Du Bois

Dr. Napoleon Wellington Jackson= James Weldon Johnson

Mr. Walter Williams= Walter White

Dr. Joseph Bond= Horace Mann Bond

Santop Licorice= Marcus Garvey

Racism and The Left: Color and Caste

He always prefaced his proposition by pointing out that the working people were never so contented, profits never so high and the erection of cities never so intensive; that the entire South depended upon keeping labor free from Bolshevism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, trade unionism, and other subversive movements [….]

The great mass of white workers, however, was afraid to organize and fight for more pay because of a deepset fear that the Negroes would take their jobs[…]

The erstwhile class conscious workers became terror-stricken by the specter of black blood. (80)

Racism, the Labor Movement, and Communism

The radical labor organizer, refused permission to use the Knights of Nordica Hall because he was a Jew was prevented from holding a street meeting when someone started a rumor that he believed in dividing up property, nationalizing women, and was in addition an atheist. He freely admitted the first, laughed at the second and proudly proclaimed the third. That was sufficient to inflame the mill hands, although God had been strangely deaf to their prayers, they owned no property to divide and most of their women were so ugly that they had no fears that any outsiders would want to nationalize them. The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished down the road with a crowd of emaciated workers at his heels. (97)

Race and American Politics

Two days before election the situation was unchanged. There was joy in the Democratic camp, gloom amongst the Republicans. For the first time in American history it seemed that money was not going to decide an election. (139)

Reworking Renaissance Nonsense

Renaissance Nonsense: Racial Essentialismin "The Negro Art Hokum”

Negro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self evident foolishness. Eager apostles from Greenwich Village, Harlem, and environs proclaimed a great renaissance of Negro art just around the corner waiting to be ushered on the scene by those whose hobby is taking races, nations, peoples, and movements under their wing. New art forms expressing the "peculiar" psychology of the Negro were about to flood the market. In short, the art of Homo Africanus was about to electrify the waiting world. Skeptics patiently waited. They still wait.

National and Local Literatures: The Heterogeneity and Homogeneity of Aframerican Expression

True, from dark-skinned sources have come those slave songs based on Protestant hymns and Biblical texts known as the spirituals, work songs and secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues, that outgrowth of rag-time known as jazz (in the development of which whites have assisted), and the Charleston, an eccentric dance invented by the gamins around the public market-place in Charleston, S.C. No one can or does deny this. But these are contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country. They are foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes . They are no more expressive or characteristic of the Negro race than the music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race. If one wishes to speak of the musical contributions of the peasantry of the South, very well. Any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar. It is merely a coincidence that this peasant class happens to be of a darker hue than the other inhabitants of the land. One recalls the remarkable likeness of the minor strains of the Russian mujiks to those of the Southern Negro.

 

Racial Essentialism as a Product of Black Artistic Production in “The Negro Art Hokum”

Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so "different" from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American.

BERTWILLIAMS

Racial Essentialism as a Product of Black Artistic Production in Black No More (1931)

“It isn’t necessary, my dear foster,” explained the physician, patiently. “There is no such thing as black-dialect except in literature and drama. It is a well-known fact among informed persons that a Negro from a given section speaks the same dialect as his white neighbors[….] As a matter of fact there has been considerable exaggeration about the contrast between Caucasian and Negro features. The cartoonist and minstrel men have been responsible for it largely. (14)

Caste, Class, and Color: “Africamericans”

Again, the Africamerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white Americans. He is not living in a different world as some whites and a few Negroes would have us believe. When the jangling of his Connecticut alarm clock gets him out of his Grand Rapids bed to a breakfast similar to that eaten by his white brother across the street; when he toils at the same or similar work in mills, mines, factories, and commerce alongside the descendants of

Spartacus.

In the homes of the black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation. How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?

Harlem Renaissance and the Black Bourgeoisie

Over twenty years ago a gentleman in Ashbury Park, N.J. began manufacturing and advertising a preparation for the immediate straightening of the most stubborn Negro hair. This preparation was called Kink-No-More, a name not wholly accurate since its users were forced to renew the treatment every fortnight.

Madame C.J. Walker

WWI, Primitivism, and the Birth of the Black International Subject

Max Disher and Bunny Brown had been pals ever since the war when they soldiered together in the old 15th regiment in France. Max was one of the Aframerican Fire Insurance Company’s crack agents, Bunny was a teller in the Douglass bank and both bore the reputation of gay blades in Harlem. The two had in common a weakness rather prevalent amongst Aframerican Bucks, they preferred yellow women [….]

They drank in silence and eyed the motley crowd around them. There were blacks, browns, yellows, and whites chatting, flirting, drinking, rubbing shoulders in the democracy of night life.

Hybridity: Aframericans and Miscegenationin “Negro Art Hokum”

The dean of the Aframerican literati is W. E. B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warwick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of American painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French Government. Now the work of these artists is no more "expressive of the Negro soul"--as the gushers put it--than are the scribblings of Octavus Cohen or Hugh Wiley. This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.

Hybridity: Aframericans and Miscegenationin Black No More

By the time President-Elect Hornbill was inaugurated , her Egyptian Stain Shoppes dotted the country and she had won three suits for infringement of patent. Everybody that was anybody had stained skin. A girl without one was avoided by young men; a young man without one was at a decided disadvantage, economically and socially. A white face became startling rare. America had become decidedly mulatto minded. (179)

A Race Man

He saw in his great discovery the solution to the most annoying problem in American life. Obviously, he reasoned, if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem. Americans could concentrate their efforts on something more constructive.

Dr. Crookman prided himself above all of being a great lover of his race. He had studied its history, read of its struggles, and kept up with its achievements [….] His home and office were filled with African masks and paintings of and by Negroes. He was what was known in Negro Society as a Race Man. He was wedded to everything black except the black woman—his wife was a white girl with remote Negro ancestry, of the type that Negroes were wont to describe as being “able to pass for white.” (35)