It’s the near future, and America’s systemic racism has…not been resolved.
Surveillance vans. Dreadlock ordinances. Deportation to Africa. Demelanization procedures.
A nameless black narrator is determined to work his way up at his law firm—filled mostly with old white guys—so he can afford a skin-lightening procedure for his biracial son, a procedure that will make him look white. It’s all the rage.
When reading Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s satirical, disquieting new debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, you’ll wish you didn’t see our country. But you will.
After the narrator humiliates himself at a costume party thrown by the firm, it’s pretty much downhill from there. He is forced into a position that exploits him as the face of the firm’s not-really-there diversity. A corporate retreat involves a haughty plantation tour. At his son’s school, this: “every schoolboy knows that the Civil War didn’t start because of slavery.” A cop roughs him up, almost in passing. He keeps going as the cost rises. PLEASE READ
