The politics of the book are good. But I'm not rating it on that. As a work of fictional literature, it reads like the debut novel of a writer who is really good by his third novel. 2.5 stars. ( )

Slow paced with a wandering plot, the characters failed to engage as did the premise. When compared to other racially driven stories its a dud. Another DNF! ( )

Absolutely fantastic book, I wish I’d read it sooner!! ( )

Racism vs. Human Dignity

For a nation founded on the principle of all men created equal, the U.S. has gone a long way to degrading the dignity of a large portion of its population, African Americans. It began with slavery before the Constitution codified the value of African Americans as three-fifths of whites in Article 1, Sec. 2. It took a war to abolish slavery and modify the Constitution. But then followed all manner of degradation revolving around Jim Crow laws, depravation of property rights, zealous imprisonment, forced prison labor, outright murder, all the way up to the 1960s. If that were not sufficient, we’re at it again with mass incarceration of African Americans and attempts at taking voting rights away from large portions of the U.S. population. Would you be surprised that people subjected to this over hundreds of years, remembered in stories passed along from parents to children, reported in histories, portrayed in literature, would not be effected? When Kurtz screams, “The horror! The horror!,” this is part of what he has in mind.

Which is to say that at its heart, the destruction of human dignity by relentless codified racism to the point were a person’s skin color becomes the object of self-derision and something to be changed to white. This very thing, to change to white to escape the constant punishment for being born black, motivates the unnamed narrator of Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s novel. The narrator tries mightily throughout the novel, against the wishes of his wife and the resistance of his son, Nigel, to have the boy “demelaninized” through a risky procedure with unknown future health consequences. Readers with any sensitivity to human self-worth will quickly figure out whether the narrator will succeed or fail. Key here, what is more important than where the novel ends up, are the moral questions of a society that literally forces everybody into the same pigmentation mold, and whether a father has the moral obligation to make his son fit in to avoid ghettoization or even death. In other words, it’s a novel designed to leave readers debating the morality of the narrator’s action and the greater immorality of a society that foists this Hobson’s choice upon him.

Ruffin dresses this up nicely in a black (!) comedy set in a southern American city at a time when racism has become the law of the land (similar to today, with ghettos and extreme, unfettered police harassment and murder). The African American narrator works for a major law firm. When the novel opens, he and two other African American associates are in competition for a chance to become a shareholder (partner) of the firm. As the tokens they are, the firm obligates them to demean themselves for the one available spot. The narrator will gladly do so, because winning means getting the funds to pay for young teen Nigel’s “demelaninized,” his ticket to acceptance and survival. The irony here is that Nigel is for all practical purposes white, except for a brown birthmark on his eye. But that is sufficient to regulate him to the ghetto of American life. Penny, the narrator’s white wife and mother to Nigel, is more sensitive to the issue of degrading oneself. She opposes the narrator’s every attempt at amateur “demelaninized.” And what of Nigel’s feelings? Will these rule over the wishes of his father? The answer is at the end of all the shenanigans that propel this novel about racism and moral choices.
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Racism vs. Human Dignity

For a nation founded on the principle of all men created equal, the U.S. has gone a long way to degrading the dignity of a large portion of its population, African Americans. It began with slavery before the Constitution codified the value of African Americans as three-fifths of whites in Article 1, Sec. 2. It took a war to abolish slavery and modify the Constitution. But then followed all manner of degradation revolving around Jim Crow laws, depravation of property rights, zealous imprisonment, forced prison labor, outright murder, all the way up to the 1960s. If that were not sufficient, we’re at it again with mass incarceration of African Americans and attempts at taking voting rights away from large portions of the U.S. population. Would you be surprised that people subjected to this over hundreds of years, remembered in stories passed along from parents to children, reported in histories, portrayed in literature, would not be effected? When Kurtz screams, “The horror! The horror!,” this is part of what he has in mind.

Which is to say that at its heart, the destruction of human dignity by relentless codified racism to the point were a person’s skin color becomes the object of self-derision and something to be changed to white. This very thing, to change to white to escape the constant punishment for being born black, motivates the unnamed narrator of Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s novel. The narrator tries mightily throughout the novel, against the wishes of his wife and the resistance of his son, Nigel, to have the boy “demelaninized” through a risky procedure with unknown future health consequences. Readers with any sensitivity to human self-worth will quickly figure out whether the narrator will succeed or fail. Key here, what is more important than where the novel ends up, are the moral questions of a society that literally forces everybody into the same pigmentation mold, and whether a father has the moral obligation to make his son fit in to avoid ghettoization or even death. In other words, it’s a novel designed to leave readers debating the morality of the narrator’s action and the greater immorality of a society that foists this Hobson’s choice upon him.

Ruffin dresses this up nicely in a black (!) comedy set in a southern American city at a time when racism has become the law of the land (similar to today, with ghettos and extreme, unfettered police harassment and murder). The African American narrator works for a major law firm. When the novel opens, he and two other African American associates are in competition for a chance to become a shareholder (partner) of the firm. As the tokens they are, the firm obligates them to demean themselves for the one available spot. The narrator will gladly do so, because winning means getting the funds to pay for young teen Nigel’s “demelaninized,” his ticket to acceptance and survival. The irony here is that Nigel is for all practical purposes white, except for a brown birthmark on his eye. But that is sufficient to regulate him to the ghetto of American life. Penny, the narrator’s white wife and mother to Nigel, is more sensitive to the issue of degrading oneself. She opposes the narrator’s every attempt at amateur “demelaninized.” And what of Nigel’s feelings? Will these rule over the wishes of his father? The answer is at the end of all the shenanigans that propel this novel about racism and moral choices.
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