It is about time we see someone in a liberal left journal, namely the New York Review of Books, finding their way back to George Schuyler. My one criticism of the essay (which is an adapted version of the introduction to the great Schuyler novel, "Black No More,") is Senna calls Schuyler's views in 1931 "vaguely messed up." They were not at that time. He was still a committed socialist in the Debsian and A. Philip Randolph tradition. That he found reason to critique what he saw as hypocrisy in the black leadership of the time, from Garvey to DuBois to Hughes, was a product of his hard-boiled sensibility as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, possibly the most venerated of the so-called "black" newspapers at least during the time Schuyler was writing most prolifically.
"Black No More" is a send up of race as a social construct, and follows a pamphlet Schuyler wrote about massive miscegenation in the American South while with the Courier. Schuyler wanted to find out just how much "black" was in "white" folks of the South, and vice versa. What he found, and reported in a pamphlet printed in 1929 was a legacy of rampant miscegenation in that region.
The dumb line of the dumb historian, Dumas Malone, when faced with critics (such as Gore Vidal) of his beloved Jefferson for Jefferson likely having had sexual relations and fathering children with his wife's half sister, and slave, Sally Hemings, replied to such critics that a "fastidious (Southern) gentleman" would not do such a thing (see page 214 of Malone's hagiographic "Jefferson the President"). Oh, yes they did, and Schuyler's research into racial "intermarriage" was also about those Southern white gentlemen who did not bother to marry the darker skin women they impregnated--and even about Southern white gentlewomen who enjoyed their privilege with enslaved black men. "Mandingo" was not just a work of fiction in more than a few cases.
A final bonus for readers is to consider a serial Schuyler wrote in the late 1930s, which was later put into book form, called "Black Empire," which is another science fiction oriented story about a mad black doctor who tries to unite Africa to fight against white imperialist colonialism of the "dark continent." It is a brilliant, radical book that is neither vague nor a mess.
As I have previously written in the original MF Blog, and perhaps elsewhere on Facebook about Schuyler, I will not comment further on his descent into John Birch Society circles, his fearful contempt of the 1950s through 1960s civil rights movement (his fear was that the white blacklash would be violent and far reaching), and his horrid essay in the wake of King's assassination (reconfirming the fear and essentially blaming King for his own murder), and his final descent into almost complete journalistic oblivion when even the John Birch Society found it could no longer credibly print him. He was, however, a brilliant mind for the first decades of his career, and one whose works of the first few decades of the 20th Century remain compelling, brilliant, and often fun reading. His daughter, who led a flamboyant and tragic short life, was to be the subject of an Alicia Keys film that was never filmed, which to me is itself a tragedy.
