The Human Stain Part I – The Freedom To Not Be Black

The Human Stain is a movie featuring Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, a mulatto passing for a white man.  The movie starts with Mr. Silk as a college professor who makes the poor choice of using a blatant racial slur in reference to two students missing from his classroom roster who just so happen to be black.  Mr. Silk asked his class if the two names listed actually referred to students or spooks.  He is brought before the college administrators who suspect his poor choice of words as racism.  In anger he quits.  He goes home all worked up in a rabid lather and gets his wife all worked up and excited as well.  In all the excitement, his wife suffers a massive heart attack and suddenly dies in his arms.  All of this happens in the first five minutes of the show.  But believe it or not, the movie moves at a very deliberate pace.

Through the remainder of the film we see Coleman Silk in various stages of his life.  He grows up with two obviously black parents and an obviously black brother and sister.  His father was an optometrist who lost his business during the depression and had to get a job working as a waiter in the dining car of a railroad.  At this time of his life, Coleman is a promising pugilist who doesn’t have a lot of size but has a good combination of speed and strength giving him the advantage of surprise.  Dad doesn’t approve of his son being a boxer.  But dad suffers a heart attack while working the train and dies.  Coleman decides to go off to the army to get the funds for his education.  There’s a scene where he is sitting at the recruiter’s desk studying the entry form.  He is hesitating on the question of race.  He looks around.  No one knows him and no one known any of his secrets.  He marks the box indicating he was white.  The recruiter extends his hand and welcomes Coleman into the service.

We see another part of Coleman’s past.  He’s in college.  He falls in love with a girl.  They have a beautiful and very romantic relationship.  She’s white, but she’s the one.  He takes her to see his mother.  The girl is excited.  They are holding hands almost the entire way.  But when the girl sees a black woman open the door and Coleman introduces her as his mother, things change.  The white girl goes through the masquerade of pretending everything is okay.  But as they go back home, she is repulsed.  Their relationship is over.  And Coleman has difficulty dealing with the hurt of rejection.

Shortly thereafter Coleman’s back in the ring.  He’s about to fight with a good sized visibly black boxer.  Word is that he’s strong and slow.  Coleman can beat him easily.  His coach tells him to give the people a good show.  Draw the fight out and then finish the guy in the fourth or fifth round.  But when the opening bell sounds, Coleman steps to the guy and kicks his ass as if he stole something from him.  The big guy is knocked out early in the first round.  The coach is furious.  Why didn’t Coleman stick to the game plan?  Coleman tells his coach that he isn’t going to carry some nigger just so he can put on a good show.  The word nigger comes out with such vehemence it takes the coach’s assistant, who is black, by surprise.

Eventually Coleman finds another love.  Again, she is white.  This is the woman that will become his wife and who will eventually die in the scene at the very beginning of the film.  But instead of taking her to see his mother he tells his mother that he told his new young love that his mother was dead.  He doesn’t want to take a chance of losing his newfound love so in order to avoid the pain of rejection he rejects his mother.  He tells his mother that he needs to cut her, and the black part of his life, out of his life.  His mother was noticeably hurt but she was never angry.  She simply tells her son that she never thought of him as black or white but just as her son.  Coleman’s brother however is highly enraged.  He pays Coleman a visit at his apartment.  The brother tells Coleman not to ever show his lily white face at their mother’s house ever again.

I found Coleman Silk a disgusting excuse of a black man and as a person.  But more importantly, I found Coleman’s mother even more disgusting.  Coleman’s parents never bothered to imbue their son with a sense of pride in his blackness.  Therefore, Coleman grew up seeing his blackness as a hindrance instead of as something to be proud of.  When Coleman’s father loses his business as an optometrist and becomes a porter, a job befitting a black man, it wasn’t a stain on society but a stain on being black.  Coleman saw the impact of being black had on his father which is why he enlisted into the army as a white man.  When his first love rejected him for his blackness, the problem wasn’t her fucked up perception on people, but his totally fucked up perception that his blackness was his weakness.

When his mother told him that she never saw her son as white or black, what she meant to say was that she was hoping he would take the easy route.  She wasn’t exactly rejecting her son’s blackness.  She simply gave her son no reason to accept his blackness.  So instead of learning to be a proud black man or even an embarrassed black man or even remotely associated as a black man, Coleman Silk became a white man who manifested his true hatred of himself as a hatred for black people.  Thanks mom!

While the Human Stain is a work of fiction, it covers a subject that plays itself out all too often in the black community.  So many black people reject their association or affiliation with the black community at their first opportunity.  All too often successful black people work hard to separate themselves from the black community finding their own get out of blackness card.  And these days, all too often black people will say that the best thing we can do for the black community is get an education or get a successful job and leave other black people behind.  And all too often black people are in situations where they have a choice to be proud of blackness and deal with the consequence of being black or to pull a Coleman and mentally check the box that says we want to assimilate into society proper free of our ethnic baggage that holds us back.

And given an opportunity, all too often black people who make the choice to assimilate will prove their devotion to orthodox thought patterns dictated by a society where black people are regularly regulated to the back of social standards, we are quick to refer to other black people in manners that are just as disrespectful as a black man passing as a white man using the word spook to refer to other black people.  Instead of working hard to change the conditions that make it more difficult for black people we’d rather pretend we don’t see the problems as we assimilate into the racially generic whole that works so hard to make black people reject their blackness.