I _have_ read The Human Stain, which is about Coleman Silk, a Classics professor at a small liberal arts college, who is fired after an innocuous remark about two students who fail to come to class for the first couple of weeks. The comment is something like, "Are these guys spooks? Or what?" But the students turn out to be black, and so does Silk (which we discover later in the narrative; the administration does not know he is black by most definitions. Silk is ~72 and having an affair with an apparently illiterate 34-year-old maintenance woman named Faunia Farley.

The novel uses the incident to explore the nature of race in the United States and reactions to it; academic power; and the relation of the self to one's past, as Silk tries to erase or ignore his, while the tension with his father leads to recriminations but also success. Like many of Roth's novels, the writing is fantastic and the voice strong.

In other words, I have no idea what the grandparent is talking about either.

I think the point was that Agee, like Silk, didn't consider the possibility of misinterpretation. I'm sure if he did consider it, he would have dismissed it as remote. Even so, the ambiguity of the term was current in the 70s, and Agee, given his profession, probably was aware of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (book, 69; movie 73) about a black agent, the title playing on the ambiguity. The Human Stain came out 16 yrs after Agee's article.

Hmm, y'know, until this thread I had never heard the word "spook" as a term for a black person. Anyone know the etymology?

If anything, if you'd told me it was a racial slur I would have assumed it was for white people, since spooks are ghosts and ghosts are popularly imagined as being white.

I assume because 'black people are harder to spot at night time.'

{update} Confirmed:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spook

  > The derogatory racial sense of "black person" is
  > attested from 1940s, perhaps from notion of dark
  > skin being difficult to see at night.

Interestingly enough:

  > Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during
  > World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.

IIRC, Two of those Tuskegee pilots were among the very few Allied pilots to down Nazi jet fighters. From hearing their own accounts on Dogfights, the Tuskegee pilots were exceptionally good at spotting, taking, and hitting opportunistic shots. They were flying early versions of the P-51 Mustang. Downing jet fighters that totally outclass your prop plane because you can recognize an opportunity and take it -- I find that awesome!

It was a joke. The next commenter explained...