Getting under the skin of a world-beyond-race

In Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man, white people are waking up to discover that their skin has turned 'a deep and undeniable brown'. As in his earlier works, Hamid plays with the conditions of reality as a means of stress-testing our beliefs around race, love and loss. 

The idea for the novel emerged from Hamid's experience as a brown man in post-9/11 New York. Having formerly moved through the world with relative ease, he suddenly faced suspicion and hostility. Though he recognised the injustice and arbitrariness of a system conferring freedoms and privileges on the basis of race, he nevertheless experienced the abrupt downgrading of his ethno-racial status as a real and painful loss. 

This sense of ambivalence runs through the novel's central questions. How do we honour the loss of something that we do not wish to dignify? What will we truly grieve when it is lost to us? How can loss be faced in a way that supports the emergence of something new?

The book's protagonist, Anders, works as a personal trainer and is in a relationship with long-time friend and yoga instructor, Oona. Their relatively ordinary existence is shaken when Anders is one of the first to turn dark. His initial reaction is one of rage and indignation. 

However, his emotional response become more multifaceted as he begins to navigate the world as a member of the newly-dark minority. As more people transform, panic intensifies and conspiracy theories grow louder. Radical right-wing groups patrol the neighbourhoods and, in ways reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic, public life is gradually choked off. 

However, amidst the chaos, new possibilities emerge in the relationships of four people joined by love: Anders and his dying father; Oona and her increasingly-radicalised mother; and Anders and Oona. Despite – or, perhaps, because of – their surface changes, the characters are, at last, able to see the essential reality of one another.

The novel ends on an optimistic note, with the town eventually settling back into a 'new normal' – a feeling that will be poignant for many. The much-feared society-wide transformation occurs and whiteness becomes a relic. But what are the consequences? Despite the loss and change, threads binding friends, families and lovers are re-fashioned and some of those most hostile to the transformations embrace new perspectives. Some die, others change and humanity becomes something different. The world keeps turning.

Although the issue of race is, of course, timely and serious, the book is not a polemic. Its perspective is ambiguous – it avoids taking an explicit political stance in favour of leaving the reader space to reflect. Indeed, the prose flows in a way that encourages free and fluid perspective-taking. There are limited contextual details – very few of the characters are named and we are told nothing of where or why the transformations are occurring. 

These gaps allow space for readers to co-create the world of the novel and to form judgements through their own eyes. The book's minimal punctuation and extended sentences give it a relentless cadence. As sentences shift between myriad viewpoints the reader is encouraged – even required – to continually test their assumptions and take in different perspectives; to undergo their own transformation.

The characters in The Last White Man respond to change, disorder and threat, by turning towards their ingroups and seeking sources of meaning outside themselves. These instincts are not criticised, but, rather, are presented as inherent and inescapable parts of being human. The book – like much of history – contains examples of these instincts leading people to disunity, regressive nostalgia and 'othering'. 

However, the book also offers a different, more optimistic, vision. By eliminating one of our dominant sorting mechanisms, Hamid's world-beyond-race presents an interesting challenge: if the ways in which we categorise others are malleable, can we do better than rallying around the familiar and rejecting the unknown? The journeys of Oona, Anders and their parents suggest that to do so will demand that we are able to stand beside others at their times of loss, fear and pain and to turn towards narratives of unity and love, rather than division and hate.

Reviewed by Mark Zarwi