IMAGINE a novel about “the end of black people.” One day the main character, a black man, wakes up and finds that his skin is white. The same thing happens to black people everywhere on earth. The character does not like being white.

Imagine this literary work, titled The Last Black Man, being celebrated by all the major publicity organs of the entire Western world, and maybe the rest of the world too. The novel is compared favorably with Franz Kafka’s bleak tale (obligatory reading for impressionable adolescents) The Metamorphosis. Some words used to describe the book:

“Deliciously ominous,” “deft,” “on-the-ground immediacy,” “transformative,” “breathless, incantatory,” “compellingly readable and strangely musical,” “strange, beautiful,”  “Sincere,” “earnest,” “peculiarly hopeful,” and more.

The New York Times prominently promotes it and proclaims that the book offers “a vision of humanity unvexed by racial animosities” because all people in the world are at last white.

Can you imagine all this? No, you can’t.

Any author who wrote a novel favorably envisioning “the last black man” would be a few legalisms away from a jail cell. The chances of his book receiving a review even in a local weekly would be nil. The only publicity he would get would come from a police report. The only photo of him that would appear would be a mugshot.

The Last White Man, however, is a real, recently published, fantastically celebrated novel, so brilliant, so “strangely musical,” it is hailed by the whole world. Its author is a Pakistani immigrant to Britain, Mohsid Hamid, who is now fantastically rich for serving up a literary vision of the destruction of one race. My local library system has eight copies, not surprising given the promotion and that suburban whites are particularly prone to the masochistic thrills of racial self-obliteration.

Interestingly, even though Hamid’s book describes the end of white people, the author is accused of a racial misdemeanor:

“we … don’t hear anything about how Black people feel about their numbers being swelled by all these dazed-and-confused involuntary converts.”

More from NPR:

Just as Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into a giant bug, so does Hamid’s main character, a white guy with the Nordic name of Anders who “One morning … woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” Inexorably, that mysterious darkening begins spreading to white people all around this unnamed country.

As he demonstrated in his 2017 novel, Exit West, Hamid is a chronicler of instability — borders dissolving, beliefs shifting, settled populations suddenly migrating. His surreal narratives are just-the-other-side-of-plausible because they’re tethered to once-improbable realities — events like Sept. 11 and the ongoing cataclysm of climate change.

Hamid, who is British Pakistani, has said in interviews that the premise for The Last White Man arose out of his own changing circumstances after 9/11 when, as a self-described highly educated brown man with a Muslim name, he says he “lost [the privilege of his] partial whiteness.” The isolation of the pandemic also makes itself felt in this novel: As violence escalates in response to the darkening of the white populace, characters like Anders and his girlfriend, Oona, a yoga instructor, stay shuttered in their homes while experiencing apocalyptic changes online and on TV.

Hamid’s a “chronicler of instability,” which means he makes all this “dissolving” and “shifting” seem to be just so many mysterious acts of nature, rather than the intended results of vicious and coordinated campaigns and masterful political theater.

Ron Charles at The Washington Post:

For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, “The Last White Man” is a peculiarly hopeful story. Its method may be fantastical speculation, but its faith eventually leads to the inevitability of social enlightenment. It anticipates that sweet day — not forever deferred, surely — when we finally close the casket on the whole horrific construct of racial hierarchies and see each other for what we are. (bold added)

When The Washington Post is proclaiming the “end of white people” as “peculiarly hopeful,” we know that the end of white people is peculiarly possible. This book is in the vein of the non-fiction work Germany Must Perish, written by Jewish author Theodore Kauffman shortly before World WAR II.

Kauffman’s book also received breathless praise. And Germany did indeed perish.

What the Masters of the World want, the Masters of the World get.

Of course, even if white people woke up with brown skin one day they would still be white people. This brilliant author apparently does not delve into that. When white skin turns brown at the beach, the white person does not cease to be white. Funny thing, but race is not skin deep. Fortunately, God loves true diversity. He created truly different human races. They have different physical, mental, moral, and emotional traits, not just different skin pigmentation. Some people have a hard time with that. They would rather God had done things differently. They don’t hate white people so much as they hate God. They would rather be God, creating a world “unvexed” by the wonders of true diversity, with all its colorful variety and troublesome animosities — a confusing swamp of sameness ruled by themselves.

Time writes:

From George Schuyler’s seminal satire Black No More, in which the protagonist changes his skin color from Black to white with a medical procedure, to Percival Everett’s darkly hilarious Erasure, in which a Black writer participates in a different kind of transformation by sardonically playing to racial stereotypes to great success, fantastical treatments of race have long served to underscore just how absurd it is that this social construct should wield so much power. Hamid’s novel follows in this legacy, challenging readers to consider the ways in which something as superficial as the color of one’s skin holds sway in their lives.

Race is no more a social construct than the sky or the ocean. It’s no more a social construct than the hair on your head.

Everything promoted by the media machine — run by the only group of people fanatically at war with nature and driven to achieve that white-less world — is an inversion of the truth.

The end of white people would be nothing but a disaster for British Pakistanis and people of various colors, here, there and everywhere. It never does end well for spoiled brats when they rise up against their benefactors.

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