The Last White Man

by Mohsin Hamid

the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are, and Oona said she understood, that it was like learning a foreign language, and when you tried to speak a foreign language, you lost your sense of humor, no matter how much you tried, you could not be funny the way you used to be,

Anders could perceive how self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it, and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else.

Anders’s pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there were none.

Oona’s mother, the girl’s grandmother, did so far more, and tried to impart a sense of how it had been, of what they had really come from, of the whiteness that could no longer be seen but was still a part of them, and the girl was fond of her grandmother, and remarkably tolerant of her grandmother, and so she surprised her grandmother when she stopped her one day, when she held her grandmother’s hands, and said stop,