If You Were The Last White Man, What Would You Do?

Elena Greyrock
Feedium
3 min readAug 9, 2022

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Photo Credit: Canva

The new book, The Last White Man: A Novel by Mohsin-Hamid is causing a sensation! It’s heralded as the best book of the summer by all the big name publications — The New York Times, The Washington Post, Elle, TIME, and more.

The premise is a spin on Kafka’s masterpiece novel, The Metamorphosis. In that iconic story, a man wakes up one morning and discovers he has transformed into an insect.

In The Last White Man: A Novel; the protagonist, Anders who is Caucasian, wakes up and looks in the mirror to see his white skin has turned brown overnight.

His first reaction to becoming a black man is of course disbelief, then it turns to outrage. When it is time for Anders to go to work, he calls in sick. When he finally ventures out into his neighborhood to do errands. The main character, Anders is struck by how he either feels invisible in his surroundings; or his presence emits a quiet disdain by the white people around him.

In the book, after a short time, media outlets report this occurrence is happening across the country. Many White people are awakening to find themselves transformed into brown-skinned individuals. The afflicted white people become terrified of how and if they will be accepted by their family, friends, and beyond.

In the novel, much of the population believes the white skin to brown skin transformation is an upheaval of the established way of life in society. Others feel that white people turning brown signifies it is the end of days. There are reports of suicides by the newly brown-skinned people.

Anders finds a lover along the way named Oona, and through this relationship and the turmoil around him, he experiences both a loss of his former self and rebirth of his new embodiment.

There are mixed reviews of The Last White Man: A Novel, while The Guardian called it a hypnotic race fable, Publishers Weekly called the book underwhelming. The Atlantic’s extensive review said, “The Last White Man offers no news for the nonwhite among us.”

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Elena Greyrock
Feedium

INFJ, Elena Greyrock is an author of contemporary diverse fiction. Her latest book is Six Feet Apart: Love in Quarantine www.elenagreyrock.com