Evoking Race and Privilege in The Last White Man (2022): A discourse-based post-colonial perspective

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the portrayal of racism and privilege through linguistic choices in The Last White Man (2022). The study is discourse-based and designed within the broader paradigm of discourse analytical studies and employs The Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) and Fairclough's three-dimensional model (1995) to investigate the linguistic choices to portray racism, privilege, and metamorphosis taking place in the text. In this research, it is analyzed how racism prevails in society and how the blacks are suppressed and face oppression and violence by whites. In this study, it is analyzed how stereotypical discrimination affects society and becomes a reason for inequality and imbalance in society. It results in a chaotic situation and there is a brutal killing of the blacks by the white militants. So as the blacks are facing the consequences and disparities of this racism in society, the whites have constructed an ideology that the blacks are savages and violent people. In this study, the text is analyzed from the perspective of racism, privilege, and metamorphosis that takes place in the selected novel. Study reveals that racism exists in society and a specific social class has all the privileges while the other one is deprived of their basic rights to live in a community of Superior class. Racism is so powerful in the social system even in the contemporary period that the white people have zero tolerance for the colored people. Racist ideologies are the main cause of this violence, discrimination, and intolerance against the blacks.