Political Correctness in The Human Stain
The Human Stain: Political Correctness and the Consequences
Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult certain groups of people.” In the latter part of the 20th Century and climbing into the first decade of the 21st Century, political correctness has become an inherent part of culture in America; likewise, in The Human Stain by Philip Roth, the main protagonist Coleman Silk battles against the world, a small college community, to defend himself against a staggering allegation of racism and his past.
In recent years, political correctness has become a major problem in society. During the years that this novel was written, the main topic of gossip facing the people of the United States was the Monica Lewinsky Scandal. In 1998, the news got out that President Clinton had an affair with and intern named Monica Lewinsky. Within months, the whole country was riled up and in a fighting frenzy, hoping to rid the White House of an impure soul through impeachment. The whole country focused on a sex-scandal, which shouldn’t even be public news.
It seems as though in our high-minded and well-meaning society we have forgotten the truly important things in life: freedom and the American Dream. The people have forgotten that privacy and personal decisions are individual choices and not collective decisions. Indeed, individually we have no right to condemn the misdeeds and mistakes of others when they do not affect us. The law must be followed or the system will not work, but not to the extent that we are stretching those rules to fit a puritan hypocrisy that does no good for any. Have we run out of problems in this country? Are their not people starving, sick, jobless, and dying? Why must we be obsessed with the personal lives of our leaders and celebrities? In a sense, the media is to blame. The media puts these seemingly harmless actions of celebrities and political figures into the spotlight as headlines. Nothing is safe from these people, not your past, your marriage, your family, anything is fair game.
On the other hand, the viewers of the news and the magazines that print this material pay for it. Society is obsessed with gossiping and telling secrets. It is human nature to have a secret and know it. Unfortunately, our pastime tends to hurt many professional men and women who make mistakes like everyone else. To be politically correct can change at any time, the progression of what is right and not right to say in the timeline of even fifty years is staggering. Why do we keep changing the definition of what is acceptable to call other people? Ideally, common respect for everyone would make the process of changing politically correct terminology irrelevant.
Likewise, political correctness is often a topic of satire in literature and especially in The Human Stain by Philip Roth. R. W. Emerson once stated, “The individual is always mistaken.” In this context, how can anyone stake a claim against another when he himself is not perfect? In The Human Stain by Philip Roth, Coleman Silk faces an ideological foe in the form of society represented as the Athena College community and society itself, which has driven him to not hide, but change his identity entirely. Political Correctness plays a major part in Coleman’s rise from rehabilitating Athena College to an outcast whom no one would stick up for. Every single one of his co-workers, even the ones he hired himself turned against him in his time of need because of a single word: spooks. In addition, the comment Coleman made was not even close to being racist. He was referring to the fact that the missing students were perhaps specters and not African American.
“Athena College become as microcosm for the political correctness fever and what Roth terms ‘calculated frenzy’…what Hawthorne had labeled ‘the persecuting spirit’” (Safer 118). The scale of the problem is moved from the national level, with Bill and Monica, to a small rural area of New England and a simple linguistic mistake. Looking at basically the same problem from two angles, a large and small scale, shows the utter hypocrisy of society. The hypocrisy can be seen clearly when the reader finds out that Coleman is African American himself. He changed his own race so that he could start a new life free from the chains that bound him to the color of his own skin, but the choice caught up with him eventually. All he wanted was “to become a new being. To bifurcate” (Roth 342).
The title itself, The Human Stain, is itself an “explicit reference to the biological and ethical stains people leave” (Masiero 190). The list of these specific stains includes “impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen” (Roth 242). The list shows that every person, in every situation, in reality, leaves remnants in the form of re-telling and reinterpretation of facts (Masiero 190). Purity is almost impossible to come by because everything has been influenced by something else along the line; it is how the world works. Finally, the sudden death of Iris after the public case of Coleman’s “racial slur” is a reference to the American –Anglo painter R. B. Kitaj, a friend of Roth’s, whose wife died shortly after critics condemned a show of his in 1994 (Nadel 117).
In conclusion, the consequences of political correctness spread far and wide, affecting people and culture in an innate way. Knowing does not necessarily mean understanding and sometimes people can’t see past their own self to see the bigger picture. One thing is for certain, things would be very different if we could work together and focus on the important aspects of life; if only we could find them.
Works Cited
Masiero, Pia. Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2011. Print.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Critical Companion to Philip Roth: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts On File/Infobase Learning, 2011. Print.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Vintage . Print.
Safer, Elaine B. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: State University of New York, 2006. Print.
Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult certain groups of people.” In the latter part of the 20th Century and climbing into the first decade of the 21st Century, political correctness has become an inherent part of culture in America; likewise, in The Human Stain by Philip Roth, the main protagonist Coleman Silk battles against the world, a small college community, to defend himself against a staggering allegation of racism and his past.
In recent years, political correctness has become a major problem in society. During the years that this novel was written, the main topic of gossip facing the people of the United States was the Monica Lewinsky Scandal. In 1998, the news got out that President Clinton had an affair with and intern named Monica Lewinsky. Within months, the whole country was riled up and in a fighting frenzy, hoping to rid the White House of an impure soul through impeachment. The whole country focused on a sex-scandal, which shouldn’t even be public news.
It seems as though in our high-minded and well-meaning society we have forgotten the truly important things in life: freedom and the American Dream. The people have forgotten that privacy and personal decisions are individual choices and not collective decisions. Indeed, individually we have no right to condemn the misdeeds and mistakes of others when they do not affect us. The law must be followed or the system will not work, but not to the extent that we are stretching those rules to fit a puritan hypocrisy that does no good for any. Have we run out of problems in this country? Are their not people starving, sick, jobless, and dying? Why must we be obsessed with the personal lives of our leaders and celebrities? In a sense, the media is to blame. The media puts these seemingly harmless actions of celebrities and political figures into the spotlight as headlines. Nothing is safe from these people, not your past, your marriage, your family, anything is fair game.
On the other hand, the viewers of the news and the magazines that print this material pay for it. Society is obsessed with gossiping and telling secrets. It is human nature to have a secret and know it. Unfortunately, our pastime tends to hurt many professional men and women who make mistakes like everyone else. To be politically correct can change at any time, the progression of what is right and not right to say in the timeline of even fifty years is staggering. Why do we keep changing the definition of what is acceptable to call other people? Ideally, common respect for everyone would make the process of changing politically correct terminology irrelevant.
Likewise, political correctness is often a topic of satire in literature and especially in The Human Stain by Philip Roth. R. W. Emerson once stated, “The individual is always mistaken.” In this context, how can anyone stake a claim against another when he himself is not perfect? In The Human Stain by Philip Roth, Coleman Silk faces an ideological foe in the form of society represented as the Athena College community and society itself, which has driven him to not hide, but change his identity entirely. Political Correctness plays a major part in Coleman’s rise from rehabilitating Athena College to an outcast whom no one would stick up for. Every single one of his co-workers, even the ones he hired himself turned against him in his time of need because of a single word: spooks. In addition, the comment Coleman made was not even close to being racist. He was referring to the fact that the missing students were perhaps specters and not African American.
“Athena College become as microcosm for the political correctness fever and what Roth terms ‘calculated frenzy’…what Hawthorne had labeled ‘the persecuting spirit’” (Safer 118). The scale of the problem is moved from the national level, with Bill and Monica, to a small rural area of New England and a simple linguistic mistake. Looking at basically the same problem from two angles, a large and small scale, shows the utter hypocrisy of society. The hypocrisy can be seen clearly when the reader finds out that Coleman is African American himself. He changed his own race so that he could start a new life free from the chains that bound him to the color of his own skin, but the choice caught up with him eventually. All he wanted was “to become a new being. To bifurcate” (Roth 342).
The title itself, The Human Stain, is itself an “explicit reference to the biological and ethical stains people leave” (Masiero 190). The list of these specific stains includes “impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen” (Roth 242). The list shows that every person, in every situation, in reality, leaves remnants in the form of re-telling and reinterpretation of facts (Masiero 190). Purity is almost impossible to come by because everything has been influenced by something else along the line; it is how the world works. Finally, the sudden death of Iris after the public case of Coleman’s “racial slur” is a reference to the American –Anglo painter R. B. Kitaj, a friend of Roth’s, whose wife died shortly after critics condemned a show of his in 1994 (Nadel 117).
In conclusion, the consequences of political correctness spread far and wide, affecting people and culture in an innate way. Knowing does not necessarily mean understanding and sometimes people can’t see past their own self to see the bigger picture. One thing is for certain, things would be very different if we could work together and focus on the important aspects of life; if only we could find them.
Works Cited
Masiero, Pia. Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2011. Print.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Critical Companion to Philip Roth: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts On File/Infobase Learning, 2011. Print.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Vintage . Print.
Safer, Elaine B. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: State University of New York, 2006. Print.