THE RACE CARD.(The Talk of the Town)(production of 'The Human Stain')

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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