In fear thus born from the past and a volatile present alike, the narrator registers Nigel for an expensive, experimental “demelanization” procedure, to whiten the darkening patches of skin that mark his son for risk. Nigel’s grandfather, meanwhile, was imprisoned for failing to keep his inherently “threatening” appearance in check, his anger controlled Nigel’s father has tried to raise his son in a way that would protect him from this suffering.
Most fervently, he wants Nigel to be free from the scrutiny and adversity he has himself faced as a Black man.
The novel’s unnamed narrator and protagonist yearns for nothing more than a successful future for his biracial son, Nigel. In actuality, the novel’s plot is no more absurd or preposterous than today’s news. The resurgence of the #blacklivesmatter movement, and resulting conversations about race, have illustrated just how shockingly close We Cast a Shadow sits to reality. The US President and many of his followers have ramped up their racist provocations. Since then we’ve seen the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. Surely, I thought, things would never get this bad, such normalization and societal complicity. Racial and economic tensions are not just in the background of the novel’s America: they have come fully into the open, with laws that overtly treat races differently based on the lie of safety and security for “all.” People of every walk of life have largely become resigned to it, have given up-even those progressively active in their past. The separations instead lie solely in the realm of the socio-political: this is 2018 or 2019, acutely augmented. Set in the near future, very little in this novel distinguishes the technology of its world from the present. It’s telling that my impressions of We Cast a Shadow have changed in small, but important, ways since I first read it months ago.
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