The Last White Man: A Novel

Content Warning: This guide discusses racism, suicide, substance use disorder, and violence.

The most prevalent theme in the novel is the idea that race is a construct, or an invented system of classification that has no objective truth at its core. Racial classifications have often been used to oppress groups of people for the economic benefit of the ruling racial caste. Individuals and governments have attempted to naturalize race, using pseudo-scientific theories called “scientific racism” to justify egregious behavior and racial inequality. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Learn & Unlearn: Anti-racism Resource Guide” explains:

Just because race is socially constructed, doesn’t mean that it fundamentally doesn’t affect our daily lived experiences. It means that its construction can be analyzed, critiqued, and through movement: redefined (“Learn & Unlearn: Anti-Racism Resource Guide.” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2 Aug. 2023).

Mohsin Hamid describes a post-9/11 epiphany he had when imaging the novel: “I was thinking about a world in which we realize that race is a fictional construct that we’ve willed into existence, but that doesn’t actually exist on its own (Rankin, Seija. “Author Mohsin Hamid on His New Novel, Working With Riz Ahmed and the Value of a Limited Series.” The Hollywood Reporter, 2 Aug. 2022). The novel explores race as a construct, including that of the white race, which is called whiteness theory. It explains how white culture and people occupy a structurally superior position to other races based on historical events such as transatlantic slavery and European colonialism and imperialism. While white superiority is socially constructed, it has real-world material and cultural consequences, which have led to white society amassing considerably more property and wealth than people of color, often exclusively through the expense of communities of color.

One way the novel reveals the construct of race is through its use of terminology. While the terms white or whiteness are used throughout, the expected terms like Black or people of color are never used in the novel. Instead, the narrator and the characters describe characters as being brown or having brown skin. Other terms used are “dark,” “dark people,” “dark-skinned,” or “darkened.” The author (as he mentions in interviews) imagined his own skin color, between Black and white, when he drafted this novel. Further, this is only one example of ambiguity in the novel, which is common in allegorical narratives and allows it universal meaning by not tying the exploration of race to a specific modern-day context.

Characters express ambiguity about their racial identity after the change, trying to figure out if more than their skin color and hair texture had transformed. Oona tells Anders “flat-out, that he looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different, and that anyone who saw him would think the same” (16). Anders spends time trying to figure out who has always been “dark” and who has changed. Anders and other formerly white characters cannot tell who has changed, or even who a changed person was. He wonders if people born “dark” can tell who has changed. Anders and the other formerly white characters never interact with those “born dark” except in very superficial ways, like his greetings to the cleaning guy.

Whiteness theory is critiqued rather than deconstructed in the novel. Before changing, Anders believed he had been nice to the cleaning guy, but realizes later that he had treated him more like a puppy or dog one might pat on the head (55). However, this is about as far as his realization goes. His immediate reaction to realizing that he had “darkened” was to consider himself like prey, or as something to be destroyed (5). These bestial images of people of color continue when he sees a group of men waiting to mount a truck “like a group of animals, not like humans” (26). More than half way through the novel, when mob violence subsides and he goes out to get pain killers for his father; “Anders noticed just how many dark faces there were, and how the town was a different town now, a town in a different place, a different country, with all these dark people around, more dark people than white people, and it made Anders uneasy, even though he was dark too” (116). Always-dark characters are barely part of the novel, with the only exception being the “cleaning guy” who remains defined by his manual labor, and entirely misunderstood, by Anders. Some critics have pointed to the novel’s ending as failure to imagine something genuinely new. Oona’s changed mother now peruses social media profiles of a “dark, handsome couple, a woman and a man with a certain carriage to them” (141) whom Oona believes are familiar, probably because they too had changed from being white. Oona’s mother wants to share with her granddaughter her ancestral legacy of whiteness. The change does not seem, in the end, to have inverted or dismantled the whiteness inherent in the novel’s characters.