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jeffrey b. ferguson
The Sage
of Sugar Hill
g e o r g e s . s c h u y l e r a n d the harlem
renaissance
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preface
vii
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v i i i p r e f a c e
and regulations that every racist enjoyed violating. Schuyler also rejected
the gradualist and the conformist, both of whom believed that blacks had
to become more like whites to demonstrate their qualication for the fruits
of American democracy. He believed that black and white Americans
shared the same fundamental values and the same cultural shortcomings.
Although he protested mightily against unjust racial practices, Schuyler
also challenged the protester, whose need to cast blacks as victims had
both utility and debilitating eects when taken to extremes.
Schuylers keen challenge to the moralist, the gradualist, the conform
ist, and the protestercombined with his fty-ve-year career as a promi-
nent black journalistwould in itself make him a good subject for a
critical book about American race relations. But his use of the satirical
mode as a means to this end really sets him apart among American intel-
lectuals in general and among black American intellectuals in particular.
Rather than simply advocate open intellectual, cultural, social, and biologi-
cal mixture of the races, Schuyler fashioned a satirical style that employed
racial transgression as an inherent feature of intellectual practice. His
social and cultural ideal, which conicted in every way with the sentimen-
tal dreams of those who desired uninterrupted harmony at the table of
interracial brotherhood, involved a confrontational and sometimes violent
process of interchange among individuals, groups, and the ideas that
they represented. In the process of advancing his turbulent and in many
ways contradictory alternative solution to the Negro problem, Schuyler
criticized, cajoled, and dismissed almost everyone in his erawhite and
black, conservative and radical, racist and antiracistwho had anything
of signicance to say about the race question. He did this mainly for the
black audience of the Pittsburgh Courier, whose assumptions about race he
challenged, almost always with a laugh, for four decades. This fact alone
speaks volumes concerning the diversity of discussion among blacks,
which our treatment of American intellectual history has only begun to
recognize. In his most becoming guise, Schuyler symbolizes this diversity
even as he challenges the liberal values that stand behind the celebration
of diversity for its own sake.
I rst encountered George Schuylers unique approach to the race
question in an introductory black literature course in the early 1980s. At
the time Schuylers raucous satire Black No More (1931)which told the
story of a treatment that allowed blacks to turn whitewas something
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preface ix