The Last White Man: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid

How would you feel if you woke up one morning and your skin was a different color than it had been when you went to sleep? How would the people around you react? This is the world that Mohsin Hamid imagines in his powerful novel "The Last White Man." 

Our protagonist is Anders, a formerly white man who is transformed to someone with dark skin overnight. At first he thinks he's in a dream, but as time passes he realizes he is in a new reality. He is stunned and confused and horrified. Hamid writes, "Anders waited for an undoing, an undoing that did not come, and the hours passed, and he realized that he had been robbed, that he was the victim of a crime...a crime that had taken everything from him, that had taken him from him..." 

Anders' feeling that he is a totally changed man is confirmed from the first moment he allows anyone to see him in his new state. Oona, his girlfriend of sorts, tells him flat out that "he looked like...not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different, and that anyone who saw him would think the same..."  And as Anders begins to encounter other people in the world -- from his boss (who said he'd kill himself if this happened to him) to his father (who set aside his racist tendencies to retain their relationship) to strangers (who now looked at him warily), he realized the way people act around you changes your perception of yourself and the world. 

As more people began to change, the world does not become a more accepting place. Riots break out, people arm themselves, and fear rules the day. One of the compelling things about the book is that Hamid has given Anders the ability to objectively look at the situation while being in the midst of it. He realizes that he might himself have been one of the rioters had he not been transformed. This realization is just one of many opportunities Hamid gives readers to consider how they themselves would react in a similar situation -- and how they react to people today in response to their differences. 

The story of "The Last White Man" came in part from Hamid's real life experience following 9/11. He was a 30 year old, educated, brown skinned man in New York, and people's reaction to him radically changed overnight. He was suddenly viewed with suspicion. Hamid knew he was the same person and yet somehow he was not. The way he was perceived by others impacted the way he thought about himself and approached the world. "Race is something we need to imagine our way out of," Hamid has said. For more from this terrific interview, click here. And for Hamid's website, click here. 

While a slim novel, "The Last White Man" is not an easy read. I found myself stopping many times, overwhelmed by Anders' thoughts and experiences. I wish it could be required reading in our schools, but let's first get those donated dictionaries into school libraries and suspect math books into the curriculum. (In case you're wondering, one example of a problematic math book includes a learning objective that reads, "Students build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.") For now, I can only recommend "The Last White Man" to you.