In 1917, J. A. Rogers, a mixed-race Jamaican writer living in Harlem, published an unusual novella called From Superman to Man.⁹¹

Set on a train hurtling west from the snowy fields of Iowa to sun-kissed California, it recounts a four-day conversation between a black railway porter named Dixon and an unnamed racist state senator. Angry at having been drawn into argument—at having his prejudices challenged—the senator rants about cannibalism, slavery, and Shakespeare. Dixon listens patiently, responding at length with a host of quotations furnished from scientific journals, anthropology, and literature.

Dixon is exceptional: he speaks French and Spanish, has studied at Yale, fought in the war, and believes, with a passion that exceeds the senator’s racism, in the “universality of human nature.”

As the landscape thaws so does the senator, and by the time they reach California he has undergone a Scrooge-like epiphany. Not only does he reject his former views but vows to end the “great wrong” of racism.

“I never did realize until now,” the senator says, “the great injustice that is being done to certain American citizens, and also the vast amount of ignorance that we, Caucasians, have to combat in our own people.” He asks Dixon to come to Hollywood so that together they can make motion pictures popularizing a better understanding of race, and the two men shake hands “cordially.”

This volte-face is ridiculous, but then so is Dixon—a fantastically superior being, purpose-built for the task of deconstructing racism.

From Superman to Man’s title can be read in two ways: as tracking the senator’s change of heart—his initial picture of the Nordic superman stripped of its superiority—or as suggesting that the book itself is addressed from a superman to a man, which is how it reads.

But why should the person of color have to be so wise and reasonable, so superhuman? I don’t feel empowered by Dixon and I’m not convinced that, in his words, “the full light of justice will yet dawn.” Mired in fantasy, justice seems further away than ever. Reading Rogers’s narrative, I think of times I’ve had to listen quietly while being patronized or talked down to—“So you’re cashing in on your roots?” “Isn’t ‘cultural appropriation’ a fad?”—aware that if I argue back it will only extend the torture. I’m angry on Dixon’s behalf, and I’m angry at him.

In 1905, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman was performed in London and New York. In one version of Rogers’s book he calls Shaw the truth-disseminating “salt of the intellectual world.”⁹² Both Shaw and Rogers shared an unwavering faith in progress and the supermen—powered by intellect and will, not race—who would lead it.

Shaw was a Fabian socialist, set on exposing the oppression of marriage and the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. Unlike Rogers, though, he wasn’t enamored of democracy. He couldn’t trust that knowing the “way to better things” was enough; it took a special individual charged with “Life Force” to reject what was wrongly deemed dutiful and just. His version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch was fearless, leonine, and naysaying.

Hovering behind Shaw’s hero-worship is the specter of eugenics, or as the hero of his play Jack Tanner calls it, “intelligently controlled, conscious fertility.”⁹³ If you put your faith in the radical intervention of the individual, then what more radical intervention is there than manipulating the gene pool? If you believe that history is shaped by individuals, why not try to breed one from the strongest and most powerful stock?

As Rogers was writing his own intellectual emancipation, the kind of individual greatness he believed in was being used to argue in favor of breeding out impure stocks of “Africans” and “Mongols,” and the cult of the Nordic superman was taking hold in Europe and America. Dixon is nevertheless unshaken in his belief that the right argument might show this all to be a terrible mistake, a small digression in the course of our journey toward mutual understanding. For all that his conviction is beautiful and worthy of admiration, he is full of the tragic naiveté which precedes a fall.