Jessica Krug, the movie: inside the liberal Hollywood racial nightmare of Soul Man

The plot of the 1986 comedy Soul Man reads like it was made to push every politically incorrect and white privilege hot button. A white rich kid is cut off from his father’s wealth, and has to get himself through Harvard Law School. But rather than pay his own way, he discovers a scholarship for African American students is available – so blacks up to fraudulently claim the cash.

By 2020’s standards, Soul Man is one of those films you can hardly ever got past the pitch stage. It's a toxic, tone-deaf idea, made by well-meaning white liberals who genuinely thought they were helping shine a light on racism (the protagonist, explained decidedly white director Steve Miner, “begins to get a glimmer of what it might be like to be black in America”).

Even at the time, it caused controversy. Spike Lee slated the film and called it “an attack on affirmative action”. The president of the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) called it “a cheaply made, cynical viewpoint of black involvement in American life.” The UCLA’s Black Student Alliance protested the film's opening night.

But Soul Man has retained a curious cult afterlife. When the film celebrated its 30th anniversary, there were articles examining its problematic past and misguided intentions. The cast have continued to defend the film, and it has a notable fan in contrarian black critic Armond White, who wrote that Soul Man “foretold a change in America’s thinking on a number of issues: race perception, black potential, class advancement, the Harvard institution.”

As White pointed out, Barack Obama entered Harvard two years after Soul Man’s release. “It’s not far-fetched for a movie lover to think that Obama’s rise was prepared – if not predicted – by Soul Man.”

And while streaming services have purged their back catalogues of comedies which feature blackface – Little Britain, Come Fly with Me, and The League of Gentlemen were all chopped from Netflix this year – Soul Man remains on Amazon Prime.

There's a weird parallel to the case of Jessica A. Krug, an activist and professor of African American history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C, who last week confessed that she has been lying about being black. In a Medium blog post, she wrote: “I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”

Krug reportedly received financial support from the Schombur Center for Research in Black Culture and duped fellow academics, who peer reviewed and praised her book, Fugitive Modernities, considered to be "field changing". Krug wrote: “I believe in cancel culture as a necessary and righteous tool… You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

Soul Man stars 1980s favourite C. Thomas Howell – Ponyboy in The Outsiders (“Stay gold, Ponyboy”) and one of the kids who flies past the moon in E.T. Howell plays preppy brat Mark, who transforms himself by donning a Soul Glo-glistening Jheri curl wig and overdosing on "tanning pills" – the science of which is not explained (“I don’t know how to tell you this,” says his pal. “But you’re not tanned, you’re black”).

Mark believes that the scholarship, intended specifically for black students from Los Angeles, was left unclaimed. Mark continues with the scam guilt-free – fooling his professor (James Earl Jones), fellow students, and a girl with a black man fetish – until he learns that the scholarship should have been awarded to struggling single mother Sarah (Rae Dawn Chong).

After some racial farce – in which he tries to hide the fact he’s now black from his parents, and the fact he’s really white from Sarah – he confesses to his crime but still gets the girl.

The film was written by Carol Black – co-creator of The Wonder Years – and directed by Steve Miner, whose credits range from Friday the 13th Part III to the Mel Gibson time-hopping weepie Forever Young.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, Black had started by writing a comedy about a white guy who darkens his skin to take advantage of minority quotas and get a job. “But I didn’t like what that said about affirmative action,” admitted Black. She retooled the idea as Soul man.

According to producer Steve Tisch, every studio rejected Soul Man for being “too risky”. “What I responded to – the controversy – was what scared the studios,” he said. “I liked the idea that audiences were going to have a problem with it. But a lot of studios were afraid it would come off real bad. They were afraid to put their name on it.”

Studio executives told him: “Some of us feel the material is racist.” Tisch responded: “It addresses the race issue and asks a white audience to look at its own racist tendencies.”

The film went to New World Pictures – the production company founded by B-movie king Roger Corman – and the part of Mark was offered to Anthony Michael Hall, Tim Robbins, Val Kilmer, and John Cusack. C. Thomas Howell, who was 19 at the time, said he "laughed hysterically" when he heard the story over the phone. (Speaking to AV Club in 2013, he still thought it was funny: “I hadn’t watched it in years and years, and I’m really sort of happy to say that when I watched it with my son, it’s very funny. I mean, it’s hysterical at times.”)

Watched now, Soul Man does have the spirit of Eighties teen movies – part Ferris Bueller, part Teen Wolf, but with the far-too-weighty aspirations of being the Eighties teen version of Black Like Me (a 1961 book by journalist John Howard Griffin, who darkened his skin and travelled through the south to experience racial prejudice).

If Mark announcing “I love being black!” doesn’t jar quite enough, there are more skin-crawlingly bad lines and gags: see the Harvard basketball teams squabbling over which one of them gets to pick Mark; comments such as “I’m thinking of growing some dreads!”; Mark choosing a class because the professor – James Earl Jones – is “a brother” and pretending to hate The Beach Boys to prove his blackness; and a race-obsessed fling telling him after sex, “I could feel 400 years of oppression and anger in every pelvic thrust.”

But the most excruciating line belongs to Mark: “It’s the Eighties. It’s the Cosby decade! America loves black people.” Unaware that Bill Cosby would later be imprisoned for aggravated indecent assault, Mark also learns that being black in the Eighties isn’t especially carefree.

Mark is viewed with deep suspicion by his racist building manager – despite the fact Mark is quite obviously a white bloke with painted skin and an afro wig – and subjected to racist jokes by Ivy League classmates (at first Mark tolerates them; by the end he’s punching out the joke-tellers). He’s also pulled over and arrested, then beaten up by racist hooligans in a jail cell.

The film’s most troubling scene comes when Mark has dinner with a white girl’s family, and imagines the racial stereotypes each of the family members see him as: the mother, quivering with orgasmic curiosity at the very sight of him, sees him a wild Mandingo sex-machine; the little brother sees him as a flamboyant Prince-like figure; and the racist dad (Leslie Nielsen – pre-Naked Gun but still hilariously deadpan) sees Mark as a melon-chomping pimp.

(It also has one of the weirdest ever soundtracks, including Otis Redding and Sam Moore – to lend authentic soul cool – plus some of the worst sax to ever parp its way onto Eighties cinema.)

There’s no doubt Soul Man has good intentions – however naïve they might be. It speaks to a level of privilege in itself: predominantly white filmmakers making a film that explains the perils of racism – by having a white man wear blackface. Though black cast members James Earl Jones and Rae Dawn Chong both defended it.

“I sat and read the script in privacy and found myself laughing out loud. It was special," said James Earl Jones. "It took a comic approach to the problem of someone changing racial identity. Comedy can take us into areas that tragedy cannot. They asked me if I found it offensive, and I said it treads a line – but satire must tread a line. You cannot please everybody. The writer's vision is not everyone’s but that should not stop the writer from having that vision.”

“I think its heart is in the right place,” said writer Carol Black about the film. “You end up rooting for a white person and a black person to be in love and raise children together.”

Even before the film came out there was some suspicion. The Los Angeles Times, which had been on set during production, questioned the broad race jokes, the quality of its director, the  quality of its distributor (“not famous for tasteful marketing”), and the low budget of $4.5 million.

Producer Steve Tisch remained confident. “It could easily be a pure exploitation picture. Or it could be a very manipulative message picture," Tisch said. "But I think with the story and Tommy’s performance, it’s going to be first rate. It’s not a racist picture at all. It pushes buttons in us to make us as whites look at how we relate to blacks.” In a line that underpins the naïvity, he continued: “I’m hoping [black] groups rally behind and support the picture.”

Soul Man was released on October 24, 1986. The UCLA’s Black Student Alliance organised a 200-strong protest at the film’s opening night in Westwood, Los Angeles. Alliance spokesman Van Scott said: “The film makes fun of the things we have to struggle with every day: the jokes, the hassles, the preconceptions and the demands. That notion itself – that some white kid can take a bunch of ‘tanning pills’ and all of a sudden understand all the things we have to deal with – is very offensive to us. That simplistic attitude treats the problem as if it were merely a matter of dark skin and not of 400 years of diversified culture. It’s a very misleading film.”

Willis Edwards, a civil rights pioneer and the president of the Hollywood chapter of the NAACP, said that the plot – the idea that no students in Los Angeles would qualify for Harvard – showed “the racism and sexism of the film’s creators". Edwards said: “In the final analysis, it is our opinion that the American moviegoer is really unlikely to waste good time and money on going to see this questionable effort at film making.”

“The movie Soul Man is another attempt to characterise blacks in the 1980s,” said a statement from the Black American Law Students Association at UCLA. “However, it is a shallow and futile portrayal of black law students at Harvard Law School. We find the Al Jolson-like portrayal of the main character offensive and trivialising of the reality of black law students everywhere.”

Spike Lee said the idea that black characters would be fooled by Mark's disguise means "all the black people in the movie are idiots". Lee also said that “Rae Dawn Chong’s card for the sisterhood should be revoked.” Lee recalled that Steve Tisch had called him up and “started getting nasty”. Lee admitted he hadn’t seen the film and had no intention of watching it.

In the film’s defence, Steve Tisch likened it to Tootsie, which Tisch said “used comedy as a device to expose sexual stereotyping. I think Soul Man uses it to explode racial stereotyping.”

Rae Dawn Chong strongly defended the film. “We took a brave stance," Chong said after its release. "Instead of just talking about racism, we showed it." She criticised the “crybaby Hollywood branch of the NAACP” for counterproductive outrage. Chong said that from speaking to average black citizens herself, "No one has been offended". Steve Tisch agreed. “Reaction to our picture by blacks has been terrific," he said. "A high percentage of our audience in big cities is black, and from what I’ve seen, they love it.”

The film had two prominent white fans – Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whose son Ron had a small part – and it was undoubtedly popular with ticket-buying audiences. It was kept off the top spot by Crocodile Dundee, but had a successful opening weekend of $4 million. It went on to make $27.8 million in the US.

The NAACP's Willis Edwards said: “In light of Soul Man’s successful first weekend, we hope the film’s makers will give 10 percent of their earnings to help enroll a black student in Harvard Law School.”  

Soul Man does let itself off the hook. Despite lines such as “Now a part of me is black on the inside”, Mark stops short of claiming to be the victim of racism.

"You've learned what it feels like to be black," says James Earl Jones, in the film's climactic telling off.

"No sir," Mark replies. "If I didn't like it, I could always get out. It's not the same, sir."

"You've learned a great deal more than I thought," Jones's professor says.

But Mark is forever changed. “Do you really hate the Beach Boys?” asks his friend, Gordon. Mark replies: “I guess I still like some of their funkier stuff.”

Speaking about the film’s 30th anniversary, Howell told The Hollywood Reporter: "A white man donning blackface is taboo. Conversation over — you can't win. But our intentions were pure: We wanted to make a funny movie that had a message about racism."

Rae Dawn Chong has continued to defend the film. Also speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Chong blamed Spike Lee for its controversy. "Our little film was maligned by the black community led by a jealous Spike Lee, who has never seen the film," she said.

Speaking to The Wrap that same year, Chong said about Spike Lee: “I’ve never forgiven him for that because it really hurt me.” She called the NAACP "spineless” and called Soul Man "romantic, lovely and fantastic. It’s really funny. People should give it a view — especially people who were afraid it was racist.”

(Chong might even take a soft stance on Jessica A. Krug. After Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP president, was outed for being white, Chong said: "Why is it such a thing now about her wanting to ID black? I say welcome her in — let her dress up in brownface and frizzy hair. It’s a compliment and refreshing.")

“A lot of people ask me today, 'Could that movie be made today? There’s no way that movie could be made today!’” said C. Thomas Howell in 2013. He pointed to Robert Downey Jr doing blackface in Tropic Thunder. “And he was amazing in the movie!" said Howell. "The difference is that he was just playing a character in Tropic Thunder, and there was no magnifying glass on racism, which is so prevalent in our country. I guess that’s what makes people more uncomfortable about Soul Man. But I think it’s an important movie.”