58 pages • 1 hour read
Maurice Carlos RuffinWe Cast a Shadow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Internalization of Racism
Within the first few paragraphs of We Cast a Shadow, the narrator refers to a Black colleague as “too Black to be pretty” (4). This bald-faced remark finds emphasis in the fact that the narrator himself is Black. His distaste for those who share his looks or racial identity becomes a running theme throughout the novel. The narrator hates being Black, and he dislikes Blackness in other people. When he encounters other Black people, he habitually passes judgement on the darkness of their skin or the style of their clothes, looking down on people like Etherine and Supercargo for not conforming to his own standard of a “respectable” Black person. To the narrator, respectability means downplaying one’s Blackness as much as possible. He makes no effort to involve himself in any kind of Black community, keeping his distance from the majority-Black housing development where he grew up and choosing instead to be the only nonwhite resident of a gentrified neighborhood.
While the narrator’s attitude seems contradictory, it is the direct result of his indoctrination in a society where Blackness is framed as dangerous and disgusting. Since his childhood, he has seen his Black peers and family members treated like threats—arrested, beaten, and shot for the smallest transgressions against the white majority. Anti-Black racism is so acceptable that an aspiring mayoral candidate can openly call Black people “savage […] imbeciles” and implement a curfew in Black neighborhoods without suffering repercussions. In Chapter 19, it’s casually revealed that the City is funding demelanization procedures for its Black employees. Clearly, society at large is set up to engender exactly the kind of fear and self-hatred that the narrator feels.
He is not the only character who has internalized the racism of their surroundings. Officer Dred Douglas, the cop who patrolled the Tiko during the narrator’s childhood, also harbored hatred and distrust toward other Black people, which made him an excellent governmental pawn in the continued oppression of the Tiko’s residents. In describing Douglas, the narrator says that “so much depends on a man with a hatred of his own” (101), and he’s correct. The power of the systemic racism depends on the continued oppression of Black people, and this process is expedited by gutting the community of self-worth and breaking their spirits.
Nigel provides a counterexample to the internalization of racism. The narrator’s desire to eradicate Nigel’s dark birthmarks is rooted in a mixture of fear at what the world will do to his son and hatred of the Black part of his son’s identity. Despite his father’s constant sidelining and villainizing of his Blackness, Nigel rebels against the idea that it is something to be feared. After escaping the narrator’s influence, he finds peace with himself at New Rosewood commune and allows his skin to naturally darken. For all of the narrator’s sacrifice and struggle to subdue Nigel’s Blackness, he cannot stop Nigel from accepting himself as he is. The narrator, in contrast, cannot break away from his internalized racism and eventually ends up as an isolated husk of his former self.
The Complicated Effects of Trauma on Parenting
It’s indisputable that the narrator loves his son with all of his heart. He knows that Nigel is a beautiful, gifted, and kind-hearted boy, and he wants him to experience the best that life has to offer. Because of his own traumatic experiences as a Black man, however, specifically in relation to his father’s imprisonment, he thinks that the best thing he can do for Nigel is to purchase for him a whitening, cosmetic violence. He is so set on demelanization that he is unable to see his son’s real needs—not skin bleaching products but love and support. When Nigel is first bullied at school for his birthmarks, he comes to the narrator seeking fatherly reassurance. Rather than comforting his son, however, the narrator tells him to brush off the bullying, which he sees as an inevitability. When Nigel starts crying, the narrator doesn’t console him, instead resolving to fund the demelanization. Due to the narrator’s own defeatist outlook and lack of self-worth, his solution to Nigel’s pain is not to tend to his son’s inner life but to manipulate his outward appearance in accommodation of the corrupt social system.
The narrator fears that America’s racism will crush Nigel’s spirit and potential, but it is his own actions that increasingly threaten to extinguish his son. He grows increasingly tyrannical, restricting Nigel’s participation in any activities even lightly associated with Blackness, like basketball, and coercing progressively invasive treatments, from bleaching cream to pills to dubious injections. He feels threatened when others get close to Nigel, wanting to be his “first, last and only” (174) father figure. This desire to monopolize Nigel’s life stems from the narrator’s trauma from Sir’s arrest. He was forcibly separated from his own father when he needed him the most, so he overcorrects by vowing never to be separated from his son, even when Nigel clearly needs space to grow into his own person. Sir’s arrest was caused by an uncharacteristic outburst of emotion, so the narrator tries to suppress all of his outward displays of emotion, at the cost of his ability to bond with Nigel.
The narrator’s cosmetic fixation eclipses his view of his son’s life. In the aftermath of Penny’s death, he never comforts Nigel or confronts their shared grief, preferring instead to pretend that everything is fine and play-acting the role of stoic protector. When the narrator realizes that Nigel joined ADZE, it’s a shock to him, but not to the reader. There have been clear signs leading up to the revelation—from Nigel’s strange disappearances, to the way that Araminta seems to know Supercargo, to the ADZE meeting that the narrator stumbles into when searching for Nigel—but he has been too focused on his own machinations to see reality. In the end, the narrator loses his relationship with Nigel completely after Nigel flees the city and joins the New Rosewood commune. In their final visit, Nigel finally confronts his father about the damage he caused. The environment the narrator created through his fear control was so toxic that Nigel preferred membership in ADZE to being around his father. Away from his father, he has finally found peace and self-acceptance and is about to become a father himself. After Nigel’s daughter is born, he knows that the narrator will never accept her because of her dark skin, and he gently sends his father away for good. The narrator’s fierce desire to protect Nigel paradoxically costs him the relationship completely, fulfilling the cycle begun by Sir’s imprisonment.
The Depth of Identity
In the world of We Cast a Shadow, it’s possible for Black people to procure a medical whitening of their skin from the inside out, including surgical alterations for Caucasian features. The process was first popularized by popstar Crooked Crown, who went from being a visibly Black woman to looking vaguely Greek. Crown enjoys all of the privileges of a non-Black identity after her surgeries. The narrator meets other Black people who have had single surgeries, like nose jobs and lip thinning. Even Dinah undergoes a series of such surgeries. This possibility of changing one’s outward appearance, partially or completely, brings up the question of whether racial identity is only skin-deep. Ruffin uses the character arcs of Nigel and the narrator to explore this question.
Throughout the novel, the narrator associates the Black part of Nigel’s biracial identity deeply with the dark patches of skin on his face and body. He single-mindedly chases his goal of medically erasing those marks and, in the narrator’s eyes, turning Nigel into a non-Black man, sparing him the consequences of growing up Black. He sees Blackness not as a core part of his son’s identity, but as something that can essentially be extracted and discarded. Whenever the birthmark is temporarily obscured from view, the narrator sees his son as a “normal” child. When Nigel cuts ties with the narrator, he allows his skin to darken naturally, and on their final meeting the narrator views his son as a Black man.
In the end, it’s the narrator who gets the procedure. He goes from presenting as Black to presenting as white and enjoys the consequent shifts in others’ regard. He describes the process as watching “the memory of [his] darker self, fading into the grasslands of the past” (300). He can finally enjoy a privileged invisibility rather than having to debase himself to appear unthreatening. The procedure changes his life.
However, the narrator remains inwardly unchanged. He still suffers the devastating effects of lifelong racial trauma, as shown by his eventual psychological deterioration. The surgery changes others’ perception of him, but it cannot erase his lived experiences as a Black man. After he is slashed in a pirate attack, the narrator finds that the new, healed skin is of his un-demelanized complexion. The darkly healed wounds symbolize innateness; identity is not something that can be outrun or altered through a procedure, but an unchangeable part of the self that resides within. At the end of the novel, the narrator is still tormented, slated to “[haunt] endless grasslands in search of a spear tip sharp enough to finally cut this knot” (320). The repeated image of grasslands implies the narrator’s continued bondage to his racial trauma and that he will be trying in vain to cut that tie even after death.
