{"id":459,"date":"2012-05-21T22:28:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-22T02:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=459"},"modified":"2012-05-21T22:28:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T02:28:49","slug":"george-s-schuyler-black-and-racially-incorrect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/05\/george-s-schuyler-black-and-racially-incorrect.html","title":{"rendered":"George S. Schuyler: Black and “Racially Incorrect”"},"content":{"rendered":"

You simply\u2014and sadly\u2014don\u2019t hear much about George Schuyler these days.<\/p>\n

Schuyler was born in Rhode Islandin 1895.\u00a0 From the 1920\u2019s to the 1960\u2019s, he was widely regarded as perhaps the most prominent black columnist in the country.\u00a0 Yet it is probably safer to say that he was among the ablest of writers, black or <\/em>white, of the twentieth century.\u00a0 This, at any rate, is how his good friend and quasi-mentor, the famed H.L. Mencken, once described him.<\/p>\n

Schuyler was one of the editors of The Pittsburg Courier, <\/em>the second largest \u201cNegro\u201d publication inAmerica, in which he published a weekly column.\u00a0 He also published widely in magazines black and white, right and left.\u00a0 Schuyler was part of that circle of black intellectuals that later became identified with \u201cthe Harlem Renaissance.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, why do we not hear more about this accomplished figure?<\/p>\n

The answer to this question is straightforward enough: over the span of his long and illustrious career, Schuyler evolved into a conservative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he wasn\u2019t just any old kind of conservative.\u00a0 Schuyler relished in dragging the mushy minded heads of utopian dreamers to the guillotine of his razor sharp wit.\u00a0 The thing is, the folly on which he most often set his sights is the racially correct orthodoxy of today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take, for example, his position on Malcolm X. On more than one occasion, and with the greatest of ease, he took the former minister of the Nation of Islam (NOI)\u2014as well as the Nation of Islam itself\u2014to the proverbial woodshed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once, during a radio broadcasted discussion on black American Muslims, Schuyler and Malcolm X were members of a panel along with James Baldwin and some other notable figures of the day.\u00a0 Schuyler wasted no time in trimming Malcolm down to size.\u00a0 The Nation\u2019s worldview is \u201canti-Christian\u201d and \u201canti-white,\u201d Schuyler abruptly declared.\u00a0 Worse, among \u201cthe many falsehoods upon which this movement is founded\u201d is the fiction that \u201cwhite Christians were responsible for slavery in the world.\u201d\u00a0 In reality, however, \u201cthe Moslems carried on slavery for something like twelve or thirteen hundred years before the white European Christians started it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

During this same exchange, Schuyler observed the contradiction at the very core of Malcolm\u2019s NOI philosophy.\u00a0 On the one hand, the NOI insists that it is apolitical.\u00a0 On the other hand, it demands a separate territory within the continental United States for itself. Schuyler pointed out to Malcolm the impossibility of reconciling these two claims.\u00a0 Facetiously, the former asserted his desire to \u201cknow how any group in the United States is going to separate part of\u201d the country \u201cto live in without having something to do with politics.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eight years after Malcolm X\u2019s assassination, a movement was afoot to memorialize him.\u00a0 Schuyler responded by saying that we may as well memorialize Benedict Arnold.\u00a0 He said that Malcolm, like his one time mentor and the man who would eventually be the death of him\u2014Elijah Muhammad\u2014was \u201can underworld character.\u201d\u00a0 Schuyler admits to having been \u201castonished\u201d by Malcolm\u2019s \u201cwide ignorance\u201d of history generally and Islamic history in particular.\u00a0 Malcolm had \u201cthe all black complex\u201d\u2014at least until Elijah Muhammad and the Nation cut him loose and he spent eleven days traveling toMecca.\u00a0 There, he claimed to have experienced for himself what Schuyler told him years earlier: some of the very same \u201cwhite devils\u201d who Malcolm became famous for demonizing were also Muslims!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Schuyler is skeptical that Malcolm\u2019s worldview was really revolutionized within less than two weeks.\u00a0 He noted that while \u201cit was good to learn\u201d that Malcolm \u201cnow believed whites were human beings,\u201d he also pointed out that Malcolm did not <\/em>learn that \u201cslavery was widespread in Arabia.\u201d\u00a0 Neither did he learn \u201cabout the slave traffic from Africa to Mecca where \u2018pilgrims\u2019 are still sold for payment of their passage to the Holy City.\u201d Finally, Malcolm failed to mention to the press that he had met with \u201cradical and black racist groups in Africa [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

Before no time, Schuyler remarked, Malcolm\u2019s \u201cfive-cent sheet, The Blacklash,<\/em>\u201d was headlining \u201cthe same old racist bilge [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

Malcolm had not changed his spots, as far as Schuyler was concerned.\u00a0 \u201cDuring the past generation,\u201d Schuyler wrote, \u201cthe black \u2018leaders\u2019 afflicting the nation have been mediocrities, criminals, plotters, and poseurs [.]\u201d Malcolm X, he concluded, was no exception.\u00a0 To the end, he remained \u201ca pixilated criminal [.]\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Malcolm X has assumed a cultural significance of legendary proportions. Schuyler\u2019s withering critique of him is sufficient to account for the state of neglect into which he’s been forced.\u00a0However, for as large as Malcolm has become, he still hasn\u2019t usurped the privileged place of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the pantheon of politically correct heroes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my next article, we will see that Schuyler was no more merciful toward King than he was toward Malcolm.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You simply\u2014and sadly\u2014don\u2019t hear much about George Schuyler these days. Schuyler was born in Rhode Islandin 1895.\u00a0 From the 1920\u2019s to the 1960\u2019s, he was widely regarded as perhaps the most prominent black columnist in the country.\u00a0 Yet it is probably safer to say that he was among the ablest of writers, black or white,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nGeorge S. Schuyler: Black and "Racially Incorrect"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/05\/george-s-schuyler-black-and-racially-incorrect.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"George S. Schuyler: Black and "Racially Incorrect"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"You simply\u2014and sadly\u2014don\u2019t hear much about George Schuyler these days. 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