“At Best Race Is a Superstition”: George S. Schuyler’s Journalistic Battles with Racial Absolutism

Abstract

When scrutinizing American literary history, it is difficult to find literary figures who in the pre-World War II period, constructed their careers on a consistent opposition to eugenics. One of them undoubtedly is George S. Schuyler, an African American journalist and writer who grounded his life and career in a persistent and stubborn repudiation of what he perceived to be the staples of eugenics: belief in the existence of races, racial absolutism and racial purity. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Schuyler published articles and fiction that questioned the legitimacy of race and were intended to prove that “[a]t best race is a superstition.”1 Consequently, they were also intended to undermine the value of racial essentialism and reject the belief in the existence of racial differences. Schuyler’s desire to manifest open antiracialism was sealed in the 1920s with his life choices: He accepted an invitation from the leading white critic H. L. Mencken to contribute regularly to American Mercury, an opinion-shaping journal aimed at white liberal literati,2 and in 1927, he married a white Texan, Josephine Cogdell, thus violating the taboo on interracial relations. Other professional and personal choices that challenged American racial exclusivity earned him both admiration and scorn among black literati, and over time seem to have marginalized him as an intellectual.