The Human Stain | Themes & Symbolism

The Human Stain Significant Topics

Secrets and Lies

In the beginning, this novel appears to be a novel about racial discrimination. Coleman Silk has been accused of being a racist by the college where he has worked for more than forty years, first as a Classics professor and then as a dean of faculty. Irony twists the plot when it is revealed that Coleman Silk is himself a light skinned black man who has passed as white since his early twenties. Coleman made the decision to pass as a white man when he entered the Navy. Coleman has attended Howard College for a semester shortly before enlisting and discovered by attending the traditionally black college that he had become a part of a "we," a collective "we" with which he did not feel comfortable. Coleman is an individual who wants to live in the anonymity of a world without restrictions.

Coleman never tells his wife and children about...
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