Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity

5. Passing as Pastime

105 CHAPTER FIVE Passing as Pastime Coleman Silk is not the only passer in The Human Stain. Crammed with passers of all sorts—racial, ethnic, class, professional, ability, mental health—the story is set during the months leading up to the Clinton presidential impeachment hearings in 1998 and during the postwar era of the 1940s and 1950s. Because lines of race and color are the most entrenched in these settings, and because Coleman is the only racial and ethnic passer, Coleman proves to be the one who causes the most trouble, not just for himself and the other characters in Philip Roth’s novel (2000) and Robert Benton’s film (2003)—his lovers, wife, children, siblings , parents, classmates, coworkers, students, and biographer— but for readers and moviegoers as well. Coleman’s troublemaking is enhanced by the fact that he appears to be someone he is not. As a consequence, he sees himself differently than others do. And the more everyone sees, the less everyone knows. Where Coleman sees a black man, everyone else sees a white and Jewish man. Where Coleman sees a white and Jewish man, everyone else sees a black man. Everyone knows and no one knows. Everyone is a dupe and no one is a dupe. Everyone is an in-group clairvoyant and no one is an in-group clairvoyant (Password Two). 106 • Clearly Invisible Appearance is not the only thing that fails Coleman in The Human Stain. Eventually language betrays him too. Consider how readers and moviegoers meet the passing protagonist, as a seventy -one-year-old classics professor and dean of faculty at Athena College in western Massachusetts. “Coleman had taken attendance . . . , [and] as there were still two names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth week of the semester, Coleman in the sixth week, opened the session by asking, “Does anyone know these people ? Do they exist or are they spooks?”1 Coleman’s sarcasm, which Athena’s administration ultimately condemns as a racist epithet, is the start of Coleman’s end. It turns out that the missing students are black. When the students hear about Coleman’s question, they file a complaint charging him with racism. Coleman explains that he used “spooks” literally as a synonym for phantoms and not as an insult. Despite a lack of realistic motive or proof that Coleman made a racist remark, no one at the college believes what Coleman says. No one believes him because no one knows that he is a black man passing as white and Jewish.2 Readers and audiences expect Coleman’s secret, if told, to exculpate him. Coleman disagrees . He thinks that his sincerity and character—not to mention the fact that he never saw the students and thus could not even guess their racial identities—should be enough to clear him of the ridiculous charge. Coleman maintains his position and keeps the secret of his passing, which results in his dismissal from Athena College and forced retirement.3 And so from the very beginning The Human Stain presents Coleman’s passing as tragic, a phenomenon based on secrecy that entertains in proportion to the amount of suffering ingroup clairvoyant audiences witness passers endure.4 As modes of entertainment, both the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain portray passing as updated versions of a classical theme—a tragic character’s doomed attempt at liberation that reifies the tragic reality of a racial hierarchy. The novel boasts much critical acclaim, even a PEN-Faulkner award. The New York Times called it Roth’s “most interesting book; its particular hero-fool [Coleman] is arguably the most socially intriguing character to whom Roth has ever devoted himself.”5 Readers take pleasure in negotiating reflections of themselves in the narrative and connecting to Coleman’s true identity as they see it. In readers’ imaginations Coleman looks like a light-skinned black man passing as white and Jewish. His choice to pass is considered Passing as Pastime • 107 a natural one given the value of whiteness in the monoracial caste system of segregation. Readers’ expectations are met because they can out Coleman definitively as a passer and identify with and pity him on that basis. Because film intervenes more directly in the relationship between image and audience, filmgoers often react differently to narratives than readers. Such is the case with the film version of The Human Stain. In fact, Miramax, the...