![]() ![]() The father’s lack of identity threatens to engender itself in his child. Rather than instilling self-love or resilience in his son’s inner life, however, he fixates on the bodily exterior he sees demelanization-or Black erasure-as salvation. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. ![]() A childhood steeped in subjugation (his own and others’) produces an involuntary fear of Blackness and a constant, gripping terror that his biracial son could be perceived as Black. Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. While this apparent hypocrisy is an often unsympathetic trait, it is the consequence of racial trauma. Despite his awareness of his sheer luck, he eyes other Black people with suspicion and derision. His internalized racism, however, yields a defensive egoism: He considers himself unique because of his lofty education and absent incarceration history-something that separates him from most of the City’s Black population who lack his good fortune. As a Black man, he harbors deep self-hatred because of societal racism. In truth, his name matters: The narrator’s permanent namelessness symbolizes his indistinct sense of self. He insists that his name doesn’t matter and describes himself as “a phantom, a figment” (1). While the entire novel is written from the narrator’s perspective, the reader never learns his name. ![]()
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