Philip Roth's The Human Stain was published in 2000, the year I was on sabbatical writing my book, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. At the time, and even more subsequently, I was struck by the surprising continuities between the passing fictions of Chesnutt and other writers of his era and Roth's representation of race in The Human Stain. One of Chesnutt s novels in particular, The House behind the Cedars (1900), helps us see that although exactly one hundred years separate these two texts, little has changed with regard to race in America. Despite the dismantling of the legal system of American apartheid that had its origin in Chesnutt's lifetime, the American imagination remains largely intact, and we continue to insist on our binary, continue to maintain and police the color line. As Judy Scales-Trent has observed, [W]hite America expends enormous resources in school and in the media to teach [about] the intrinsic rightness of the color line, so that it won't be questioned and so that future generations will continue to stand (481). Of course, the genre in which this standing guard is most obvious is the passing narrative because the liminality of the negro (to use a nineteenth-century locution) calls into question the supposed impermeability of the color line. In this article, I use Chesnutt's work, both and nonfiction, as a way of approaching the issue of passing and race in The Human Stain, and of exploring the persistence of essentialism in American thinking and the responses to that essentialism that maintain the existence of the color line.1Before going on to discuss the issue of race in particular texts, I need to unpack the term racial essentialism. As Adrian Piper makes clear in her important essay for White, Passing for Black, the function of essentialism rests on the assumption that when one looks at another human being who has been racialized, one can make certain fundamental assumptions about that person based on the group that he or she has been assigned to. As the narrator of Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale puts it: Man had epidermalized (52). Once Being is epidermalized, then the Other can be known in his or her essence, and nothing can change that essence, not learning, not culture, not even a mixed ancestry. But a unique aspect of American essentialism is what anthropologists define as 'hypodescent,' which means that the racially mixed people are assigned the status of the subordinate a way of categorizing race that exists only in the United States (Scales-Trent 476). And because Americans, uniquely, also want race to be seen, at least when concerning African Americans, as binary, the result of a system of hypodescent is that anyone who has any African American ancestry is automatically assigned to the subordinate group, what is commonly called the one-drop rule.2 Since there are no gradations of race within this system in the United States, from the beginnings of slavery African Americans have passed as white to escape their subordinate position. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the passing novel itself has been a genre that attempts to dismantle that binary. If the author can demonstrate that the passing black character is no different from the white character in and cultural attainments, and most importantly in feeling, then the writers of these texts hoped that they could begin to show that the binary was little more than a social fiction (Chesnutt, Essays 134).Chesnutt and his generation used different terminology, not essentialism and construction, but scientific racism and environmentalism. Like many African American writers in the nineteenth century, Chesnutt was a thorough environmentalist. In other words, he believed that races did not differ fundamentally, and that all differences could be accounted for by differences in environment. …