When your whole life is a lie, it’s hard to ever really be happy or achieve inner peace. This is what Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) struggles with in the movie: The Human Stain which is based on novel written by Philip Roth. Even sadder, is that when an opportunity presents itself for him to come clean about the lie, he chooses to remain silent even thought it means loosing his job. What’s really sad is that the lie relates to who he is as a person. You see in an effort not to be political or deal with possible rejection socially and professionally under the Jim Crow era, he abandons his black family by choosing to pass as white. Granted he did it because he wanted to get ahead in life, it’s just really sad that people were forced to even consider that an option. Of course, I suppose there is a positive side in that those who did pass might have actually helped break down racial barriers. After all, if the lie is eventually revealed, I suppose it would force those who accepted the person as white to rethink their views about black people.