With the novel “The last white man” Mohsin Hamid wanted to cast light on the issue of racism, he tacitly tried to explain that racism is something the society made up through the years.
In the novel, a white man named Anders gets up one morning and discovers his skin has changed color. Finding out his skin has become black is a shock to him and at first he doesn’t want anyone to see him like that.
His skin now has a different color, but he believes he is the same person as he was before and actually this is true, but as time goes by, he starts behaving in a different way, influenced by the vision of him that white people now have.
In the novel gradually more and more people wake up with black skin tone and as this happens, chaos and violence are all over the streets.
There are many books that deal with the problem of racism, but this one really makes you reflect upon it. What would we do if we were in the same situation as Anders’? I really don’t know how to answer this question.
In America black people have historically been discriminated against; their slavery lasted until the Civil War of 1865, when the American Constitution was written.
The 13th and 14th amendments abolish slavery and give equal rights to black citizens.
So it seems that there was a time when blacks were an unavoidable part of the society, when they were free. This freedom was bogus because even after the end of slavery, they have however been continuously subject to discriminations and prejudices.
Obama’s election as the first black president of the USA has been an important step forward in the fight against black discrimination in the country. The problem is that black discrimination is an issue now rooted in the society and difficult to be removed if there isn’t common commitment.
The book talks also about physical violences, not only verbal racism.
In the USA black murder rates are higher than those of other ethnicities. In the last years, interest in black murders had increased, especially after some police killings of young blacks. In my opinion, the protests that these homicides have unleashed are proof that something is changing in the society.
I think that old generations discriminated black people, because they feared the differences and they grew up in a society where racial discrimination was something normal and fair, as if they deserved to be treated badly just because they had skin of a different color.
On the contrary the new generations, like ours, are more and more against these violences because we grew up being aware that the only race existing is the human race. In my opinion this is because now we live in a society that is trying to integrate more and more black people and for example it is luckily normal for us to have black classmates or to have a black friend in our sports team.
In conclusion I would like to say that if black people now are mingled in the society it is thanks to education. We need to increase people’s awareness on this issue, making them know what has been done to blacks throughout history and in what forms racism is still manifested nowadays. Just by listening to black people’s stories we can understand what it means to be a black living in this society and what it means to be discriminated against.