In the new film “The Human Stain,” based on the Philip Roth novel, an actor named Wentworth Miller plays the young Coleman Silk—or, rather, the young Anthony Hopkins. (Hopkins, you see, plays the older Wentworth Miller.) Silk is a black man who, by dint of the lightness of his skin and his determination to circumvent prejudice, passes himself off, for most of his life, as a white man—a Jewish white man. In real life, Hopkins is a Welshman (white, not Jewish), but Miller’s origins are mixed. His father is black; his mother is white. (To be precise, his father is African-American-Jamaican-German-English; his mother is Russian-Dutch-French-Syrian-Lebanese; and, like most people, he has a Jewish great-grandmother, on his father’s side.) Miller doesn’t look black, whatever that means, but neither does Hopkins, or Silk. (Miller doesn’t look anything like Hopkins, either.)
In the story, Silk, a classics professor, loses his job when he is accused of racism for using the word “spooks” to describe two black students who have never shown up for his class. He means that they’re so reliably absent as to be nonexistent, but the students and the school administrators hear something else. Silk holds on to the race card, choosing not to reveal that he’s black—a fact that would, presumably, exonerate him. Down goes Silk.
It so happens that Wentworth Miller found himself in a similar jam when he was in college. As a junior at Princeton, in 1994, he published, in the Daily Princetonian, a cartoon featuring Cornel West, who was then a professor of African-American studies there but who had just been hired away by Harvard. The cartoon depicted Muffy, a white Harvard student, imagining her first class with West, who is saying, “Today’s lecture is entitled, ‘Rhythm—Why None of You Have It, and How You Can Get It.’ ” It also described West as “newly purchased,” which is academe-speak for a new hire.
This did not go over well—“newly purchased” was taken to be a reference to slavery—and within days the paper had run angry letters signed by dozens of students and faculty members, including the novelist Toni Morrison, symposia had been convened, and the school had been plunged into one of those predictable convulsions of recrimination and argument. The story made the Times, and Wentworth Miller, who everyone assumed was white, was transformed into a controversial figure: the campus bigot. Yet, like Silk, at no point did he bring up his background, choosing instead to mutter some sentences about an attempt to lampoon racial stereotypes. His own race card went unplayed.
“To be perfectly clear, passing”—that is, trying to pass oneself off as white, as Silk does—“is something that has never crossed my mind,” Miller, who was brought up in Park Slope, said last week, over breakfast. He speaks with great precision and doesn’t blink very often. “Instead of stepping forward and explaining what I’d meant by the cartoon and positing my own racial background as evidence that I’d really meant no harm, I chose to remain silent. My attitude was, If they don’t get it, I don’t have to explain it, which was my way of saying that if they don’t get me, I don’t have to explain me. The people who knew me on campus and knew my background knew where I was coming from, but I think for most people I was just a name in the paper, and they probably assumed I was white.”
This, apparently, was the assumption when, seven years later, Miller was trying out for the part in “The Human Stain.” On this occasion, however, he was moved, either by emotion or by exigency, to posit his background. At the audition, he told the casting director that the script resonated with him, because, he said, “I’m a minority.” He soon found himself recounting the Cornel West cartoon episode, and then he read some scenes. “When I was done, she was in tears and I was in tears,” Miller recalled. After he was invited back for a screen test, though, his manager passed along a request: “They want to make sure you are who you say you are.” So Miller went to Kinko’s and made color copies of family photographs, and soon he had his first role in a motion picture.
After shooting “The Human Stain,” Miller wrote a letter to Cornel West, in which he apologized for the cartoon in the Princetonian and told him about his turn as Coleman Silk. He heard nothing back, but, as luck would have it, West, who is a friend of the actress Anna Deveare Smith (Miller’s mother in the film), showed up at the New York première, a couple of weeks ago. “The first thing he did was give me this big bear hug,” Miller said, “which really meant the world to me.”
