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THE HUMAN STAIN
An Interview with Consultant Allison Davis

When you think of films that deal with race, you have to wonder whom the filmmakers go to get advice from as far as authenticity or experience. In “The Human Stain”, Allison S. Davis served as a consultant to the production and makes his feature film debut in a minor role as a bigoted passenger on a dining car.

As a person of color, Allison is proud of his heritage, but with extremely light skin, he often appeared to others as a white man. He was able to see and hear what others thought of blacks as they were unaware of his race.

For the last 30 years, Mr. Davis has practiced law in Chicago specializing in real estate and community development. In an interview with blackfilm.com, Mr. Davis speaks about his position as a consultant to “The Human Stain”.

How did you get brought into this film as a consultant?

AD: I have known Tom Rosenberg for about 30 years and we saw each other on the golf course about two years ago and he had asked if I had read “The Human Stain”. It didn’t trigger anything, so asked, “What’s it about?” He then started to tell me about this professor in a New England college. I then said, “Oh, yes, I read the review in the New York Times, but I was told it was loosely based on his life.” “I had intended to read it, but it slipped away when it came out during the summer” is what I said next.

He asked if I could now read it and I told him, I would be happy to do so. The next day the book showed up on my desk and I read it in like 2 days and was fascinated by the story. It really grabbed me. I called Tom and told him the book was unbelievable. We had a discussion and asked if I wouldn’t mind reading the screenplay.

I got the document and the scenes which interested me was the scene with the family where Coleman’s father brought up the issue of boxing and the one where he rejects his family and the one with the sister after the funeral.

There’s a scene where the family is having dinner and the family is leaving to catch a train. I thought that was unbelievable. I called him back and told him I thought it was better than the book.

*snip*

. My father (William Allison Davis) was a professor, a distinguished one, and was the first African American tenured professor at a major white university (University of Chicago) in this country so he went through the same debate.

He wanted to teach English at Williams but they wouldn’t hire him. His first teaching job was at Hampton and then at Dillard. He made different choices and he had a different appearance then. No one would mistake him for being white if the option weren’t open but both of his siblings were very faired and both were academics and achievers on their own.

http://www.blackfilm.com/20031031/features/allison_davis.shtml

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His father

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The University of
Chicago Faculty
A Centennial View

Written with Robert Havighurst, this paper was one of a series arguing that “the American social class system actually prevents the vast majority of children of the working classes, or of the slums, from learning any culture but that of their own groups.”

Allison Davis

An important figure in psychology and social anthropology for more than forty years, Davis was the first Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected in the field of education.

Allison Davis | Education

1902-1983

Allison Davis first confronted the effects of social class on education while teaching English to black children in rural Virginia in 1925. A graduate of Williams and Harvard, Davis was discouraged to realize that “teaching in the standard manner made no sense to these poor and poorly schooled rural blacks. I decided that I didn’t know anything to teach them since our backgrounds were so different, yet I wanted to do something to affect such students.”

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/centcats/fac/facch25_01.html