Tracing the Color Line: Imperial Racism in Meja Mwangi’s the Mzungu Boy

White supremacist ideologies define human interactions in reference to the dynamics of racial Manicheism. The latter underlies an existential hierarchy that categorizes human beings in consideration of their races. This race-based classification not only fragments the world into separate polarities but also begets a socio-cultural condition that promotes white superiority and black inferiority. This racialized binarism establishes the representational structure of Meja Mwangi’s The Mzungu Boy. The latter investigates self-other dualism in the colonial African experience, a radicalized experience which is marked by symbolic dehumanization and physical brutalization. Grounded on postcolonial theory, the paper delves into racially asymmetrical dichotomies that frame African-Western dialogues in the aforementioned fictional narrative, unveiling the various forms of discrimination endured by African communities during the colonial enterprise. Differently put, it investigates the manifestations of racial Otherness in the colonial setting, a setting that advocates African unrefinement, Western refinement, and race-driven segregation that thrives on stereotypical racism.