Soul Man (1986) and the Six Degrees of Racism Within It

One discussion that always comes up when people watch movies from decades past is whether or not the film holds up.  It might have been great by the standards of the time, but with years gone by, it could be seen in a different light.  The effects might not cut it by today’s standards.  The acting could be a different style that doesn’t work in a world where realism is preferred.  Or there could be a theme or subject matter that seemed okay for the time, but is super offensive by today’s standards.

That last one could be used to describe Soul Man, a 1986 college comedy.  Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell) and his best friend Gordon Bloomfeld (Arye Gross) were accepted into Harvard Law School.  They were excited until Mark’s parents told him that he had to pay for school himself.  He didn’t have the money, couldn’t get a loan, and wasn’t eligible for any scholarships.  Until he talked to a friend who was testing tanning pills, that is.  Mark took a bunch of tanning pills that made his skin darker and posed as a black man to earn himself a scholarship.

Soul Man was a movie filled with racism.  From the visuals to the action to the dialogue, there was racism all over the film.  The intentions of the movie’s message were good.  But the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.  The good intentions of the moral in the film’s final act could not overcome the hurdles of racist antics that the rest of the movie featured.  Here are six of the problematic aspects within Soul Man, also known as the six degrees of racism.

Blackface

Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was common for white people to entertain by putting grease or other dark substances on their skin to appear black.  Minstrel shows were well known for this.  The idea of blackface came from the white majority of western culture insulting the black minority through stereotypes and racism.  Hollywood continued to use blackface through films like The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer.  White actors would portray black characters through blackface, or they would participate in minstrel show style storylines.

Blackface has mostly fallen out of media in recent years.  Mad Men used it to show how out of touch the characters were with social responsibility and empathy for other people.  But it is rarely used in earnest anymore, and for good reason.  When people use blackface, they tend to be disrespecting people on a massive scale, through racism and cultural appropriation.

They tried not to use the blackface in a bad way in Soul Man, but it’s super hard to do that when C. Thomas Howell, a white man, was pretending to have black skin.  They wrote it off as the character using an excessive amount of tanning pills, which made his skin darker.  The character wasn’t using blackface to pretend to be a black man.  The actor was, though, which made it difficult to watch.  It can be hard to support a character who pretends to be another race when the actor was in full blackface for the role.

Melora Hardin

The love interest in Soul Man was played by Rae Dawn Chong.  She wasn’t the only woman that Mark Watson was interested in during his Harvard days.  Melora Hardin played Whitney Dunbar, the daughter of Mark and Gordon’s landlord.  She constantly made sexual advances on Mark, sleeping with him at one point and basically stalking him for the rest of the movie after that.

That might not seem too weird.  Relationships can be between anyone, regardless of race, gender, or age.  Though there are ages that should be off limits.  The weird part came from how Whitney Dunbar went about forming her relationship.  She was interested in Mark solely because he was black.  She had heard rumours about the sexual prowess and size of black men.  When she slept with Mark, she mentioned how the size must have only been a rumour.  The other thing that made her sexual exploits fall on the side of racism was her justification for being interested in Mark.  She said that she was writing a paper about how races weren’t all that different.  There was no black.  There was no white.  There was only grey.

Whitney didn’t seem to only be into black men, though.  Mark was her primary target, but she was interested in anyone that wasn’t a white man.  In the final act, Mark fessed up to what he had done.  He told the school that he was a white man pretending to be black for the sake of getting a scholarship for which he was ineligible.  Whitney showed up at the trial with her new, Indigenous man.  She gave him the same spiel about writing a paper where races weren’t that different.  She changed it a little this time around.  Instead of black and white, there was no red and there was no white.  There was only pink.  It was as insensitive as the other version, which only furthered how racist the writing of that character was.

The Jokers

Soul Man featured two characters who were only there to make racist jokes.  They were introduced during the first party that Mark and Gordon went to at Harvard.  The two white male characters spent the entire movie telling setup punchline black jokes.  There was absolutely zero other substance to them.  Their entire dialogue was just the jokes.

If there was one decent thing about the characters, it was that they made the character arc for Mark more obvious.  As he spent more time as a black man, he came to better understand why the jokes were bad.  He started getting more offended by them as the film went on, until he ended up punching both men in the cafeteria because they were making racist jokes.  It was a way to show how much he had really grown for the audience members that weren’t paying attention to the other spelled out aspects of the movie.

An interesting note about these two characters is that one of them was played by Wallace Langham.  He might not be recognizable to many people, but he had a long stint on the original CSI as David Hodges through thirteen seasons.  That’s likely where most people would recognize him from, though he’s had a sizeable career since the mid-1980s.

The Basketball Scene

Soon after Mark and Gordon got to Harvard, they participated in some intramural sports.  The one that they chose to join was basketball.  Maybe intramural isn’t the right word for it.  It was a pick-up game.  Two captains were choosing their teams when Mark came along.  They argued over who would get him on their team because they assumed he would be good at basketball.  One of the captains argued that the other team had a black player, so it would only be fair that he got the new one.  The racism was in the stereotype that black people were good at basketball.

It didn’t stop there.  The basketball scene turned into a montage of the real black man being great at basketball while the fake black man was terrible.  The two teams watched as Mark attempted many of the same moves as the black man and failed spectacularly.  The captain of Mark’s team was shaking his head, ashamed that a black basketball player could be that bad.  It was a racist scene meant to play for comedy.

The Police

There was one scene in Soul Man that could be regarded as the most important scene of the whole film, were it not for the fact that C. Thomas Howell was a white man in blackface.  Mark Watson was driving his car around town when a police officer started tailing him.  He drove as safe and within the law as possible until a car backed out of a driveway in front of him and he swerved to not cause an accident.  The police officer pulled him over for reckless driving.  When Mark couldn’t provide ID because he was pretending to be a black man, he was detained for the night.

Police biases have been a major issue forever.  They were an issue before and during the civil rights movement.  They were an issue in the 1980s and 1990s when movies like Soul Man and television shows like Fresh Prince of Bel Air were pointing it out in their stories.  It’s still a problem.  Black people are shot and killed by police for doing things that white people get warnings for.  White people call the police on black people for having barbecues in the park.  Black criminals are labelled as thugs while white criminals are labeled as disgruntled.  There’s a clear bias that goes against the black community.  Soul Man tried to show this, though it might have not been the right platform because of the other racial issues in the movie.

Interracial Relationships

Few movies are complete without a romantic interest.  In Soul Man, that romantic interest was Sarah Walker, a fellow Harvard student.  Mark was interested in her looks and quickly fell in love with her personality as he tried to win her over.  The only problem was that he wasn’t the black man that he had claimed to be.  Before he revealed his white self to the school, he tried to confess to Sarah.  He asked her what her thoughts were about interracial relationships.

Now, this one might not be that much of a real problem.  It just rubs me the wrong way when people mention interracial relationships.  It makes the relationships themselves seem taboo.  The need to put interracial before the word relationship, because the people in the relationship are of two different races, feels narrow-minded.  It might have been taboo in the 1980s.  But in this day and age, having people of different races be in a relationship is everyday life.  People fall for who they fall for, regardless of race, religion, or gender.  To try and stop people from loving someone simply because of skin colour is wrong.  The term “interracial relationship” has the stigma of saying that a relationship between people of different races shouldn’t happen, which is wrong.

Mentioning it just the once might not sound like a huge deal.  Mark mentioned it again nearer the end of the movie.  In the final scene, as a matter of fact.  After the big reveal that Mark was white, he had to take a job at the school’s cafeteria to pay his way through college.  He confronted Sarah.  She was justifiably mad at him since she would have gotten the scholarship if he hadn’t taken it.  He asked her again what she thought about interracial relationships.  Then they made up and went off happily ever after.  The romantic storyline hinged on the interracial relationship question!

Soul Man tried to have a moral about how white people and black people are treated differently in society.  Mark, after admitting to what he had done, offered to pay back the scholarship money with interest, open up a charity for black law students, and a few other things.  When he was asked what it felt like to be a black person, he said he would never know because he always had the opportunity to leave that life.  Real black people don’t have that chance.  He never knew the real fear that they had to live day-to-day.  It was a good moral, but the way the movie went about getting to that moral was bone-headed and hasn’t aged well.

Racism is still a big problem in the world, both in North America and abroad.  Take a look at modern America where Latinx people are targeted on a daily basis.  There are concentration camps set up for Latinx people, and there was a shooter only a month ago who went to an El Paso Walmart and targeted Latinx people.  White supremacists marched in Charlottesville.  Police are shooting black people during traffic stops and for playing with toys.

But in movies, there seems to be some progression.  White people are still the majority of storytellers, both in front of and behind the camera.  Minorities are rising in the ranks, though, and we’re getting many more stories from their points of view.  Crazy Rich Asians, Black Panther, and The Big Sick have shown that audiences want stories from and about people who aren’t straight white men.  It has helped curb movies like Soul Man from being the big releases.

There are still some problems with racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and other issues getting into movies.  But they’re moving in the right direction.  These things are falling by the side as storytellers become more respectful of everyone.  Soul Man tried to discuss racism but was fundamentally racist.  It didn’t age well.  And it is now seen as a bad movie.  So, that’s why it’s here.

Now let’s get to some notes:

• I just want to say that I’m a straight white man.  My opinions on racism come from living my life as a straight white man.  If any of them are unfounded or just downright wrong, feel free to let me know.  I’m sorry if any of what I said was disrespectful or ignorant.
• Soul Man featured John William Young, who was in Hamburger: The Motion Picture (week 197) and Road House (week 200).
• Leslie Nielsen was the landlord in Soul Man.  He was also in Stan Helsing (week 64).
• This week was the second appearance of Jerry Pavlon who first appeared in Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning (week 46).
• Melora Hardin was in Iron Eagle (week 90) and Soul Man.
• Soul Man was the second time Ann Walker showed up in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  She was previously in Remote Control (week 246).
• Finally, the star of Soul Man, C. Thomas Howell, could also be seen in The Da Vinci Treasure (week 268).
• Have you seen Soul Man?  What did you think of it?  Was it as racist as I made it out to be?  Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are also great places to let me know what I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’m always open to suggestions, so suggest away.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where I share stills, posters, and clips from the movies I watch for this blog.  Check it out.
• Let’s talk about next week real quick before I head out.  Next week is a movie that was suggested to me a little while back.  It comes from a director who made a movie featured in this blog before.  It stars someone who voiced a dog in one of the more infamous bad movies.  This movie that I will be featuring next Sunday is The Wraith.  Come on back and see what I thought.