consuming lost objects

Having not built a ton of background with Freud, I had my mind blown some when reading Cheng's explanation of melancholia. Her move to apply it to race was confusing in some ways, but tremendously interesting.

Things I was fascinated with:
-The idea of melancholia as an object consumption, and essential in constituting the ego.
-The complex relationship between consumption and becoming the lost object. The intimacy of this process is then so intense that an ego/subject cannot withstand an actual return of a lost object.
-Perhaps most interesting: the treatment of this as a structural foundation of the production of ego.

At first I was intrigued but confused when Cheng made the move to race. I presumed race to be the lost object, but couldn't really make sense of when it was lost or how that would work.
The direction that eventually made the notion possible was her exploration of the United States as founded on constitutional liberties that it has never universally endorsed. Perhaps this strange disavowal then functionally serves as the distance between a self and the return of a lost object. In a way, her formulation the implies the ego of discussion is American identity. This suggests that the very structure of American identity or ego is of racial split, guilt, and trauma. This read endorses ego psychology in a way I have trouble with (or, at the very least, become confused by with respect to American identity). In any case the piece was a great read, both at the theoretical level, and also in exploration of concrete studies like clinical work and children's interactions with dolls.