Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 161To clarify these premises, it is first necessary to elaborate upon the
peculiar historical circumstances that surround the riots featured in
Roth’s novel. In an excellent book that analyzes the sociohistori-
cal causes and significance of the Newark riots, Kevin Mumford
explains that increased migration of blacks from the American South
to Newark, which accelerated in the 1950s and the 1960s, had a dra-
matic impact on the city’s ethnic demography. The white majority
that lived in Newark, and were primarily the descendants of Irish,
Italian, and Jewish immigrants, came to be equaled in number by
black migrants arriving from the South.^73 Unlike the whites, who
had largely arrived a century earlier and went into skilled employ-
ment in the manufacturing industries, most blacks, given their lack
of education (most were escaping lives as menial farm workers or
sharecroppers in the southern states) and their vulnerability to social
discrimination, could only find work “in low-skill, low-paying posi-
tions similar to those they had held in the South.”^74 T h e y f a r e d
even worse when it came to gaining positions of civil authority and
power, with only 4 black police officers and 8 black teachers out
of a total black population of 40,000 being employed by the city
in 1945.^75 This statistic is also relevant when we keep in mind the
material implications tied up with the ethnic discrimination that
Coleman Silk so skillfully evades in The Human Stain. American
Pastoral , which comes before Human in the trilogy, can therefore be
seen to offer something of a vague but more historically illuminating
introduction to the civil rights movement that Silk effaced.
Further compounding ethnic inequalities in Newark at the time
was the disparity in property ownership, with up to 90 percent of
property being owned by whites: property that in many cases was
leased to poor blacks.^76 K nowledge of such imba la nces in wea lth a nd
social power is important in gaining an understanding of the histor-
ical significance of the riots, so that, when faced with the eruption
of physical violence from the black community, it can be recognized
as a symptom of underlying material inequalities and oppression,
and not simply the spontaneous expression of a cultural or ethnic
problem. However, such knowledge is suppressed in the narrative,
reflecting Levov’s tragically myopic vision that fails to connect his-
tory and materiality with social reality.