How the Privileged Need Racism for Profit in "Black No More"

Antiblack racism continues not despite, but because of, the disappearance of blacks; this is only a paradox if the construction of blackness is seen as being essentially related to skin colour as opposed to economics. To bolster this position, Matthew emphasises the discourse of “blood purity”—as discussed in the first chapter of the current study—a form of racial identification that was less highlighted in the Knights’ previous racist rhetoric. He then uses this discourse to reinstate the oppressive work conditions of what is referred to as “The great mass of white workers” (109). These people, the text reads, were

afraid to organize and fight for more pay because of a deepset fearthat the Negroes would take their jobs. … They had first read of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated, with a feeling akin to relief but after the orators of the Knights of Nordica … began to portray the menace confronting them, they forgot about their economic ills and began to yell for the blood of Dr. Crookman and his associates. … Times were hard, they reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living. None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them. (109)

Matthew and his associates crush the workers’ unions before they begin by making the workers turn against themselves, through the spreading of rumours about the unknown racial origin of union organisers and through the general recreation of the slowly disappearing racist hierarchies. Citing Roediger, Kuenz states that Matthew plays off a knowledge of “the construction of whiteness against blackness within the context of labor.”31 The status quo of the class system is thus perpetuated through the somewhat nonsensical continuation of white racism: “Schuyler resituates both ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ in relation to an industrial and market economy increasingly willing and able to manipulate and finally obliterate any semblance of culture, tradition, and individual identity, racial or otherwise, among the people it needs to keep itself going.”32 The use of race to maintain this status quo is, as Howard J. Faulkner points out,33 most explicitly stated in the parodic passage which lists the possible effects of the “loss” of the black population:

Far-sighted people, North and South, even foresaw the laboring people soon forsaking both of the old parties and voting Socialist. Politicians and business men shuddered at the thought of such a tragedy and saw horrible visions of old-age pensions, eight hour laws, unemployment insurance, workingmen’s compensation minimum wage legislation, abolition of child labor, dissemination of birth-control information, monthly vacations for female workers, two-month vacations for prospective mothers, both with pay, and the probable killing of individual initiative and incentive by taking the ownership of national capital out of the hands of two million people and putting it into the hands of one hundred and twenty million. (135)