Rae Dawn Chong Blames Spike Lee for ‘Soul Man’ Racial Stigma 30 Years Later

“You’re either militant or you’re not and he decided to just attack,” actress tells TheWrap about 1986 movie starring C. Thomas Howell in black face

Centered on a white Harvard Law School student who poses as a young black man in order to qualify for a scholarship, “Soul Man” ruffled feathers within the black community.

[...] Rae Dawn Chong, who played Howell’s love interest in the film, told TheWrap that the uproar was much ado about nothing.

“He’d never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it,” she added, recalling that it was a time when Lee was coming up in his career and making headlines for being outspoken.

If you watch the movie, it’s really making white people look stupid.

But in its own breezy way, “Soul Man” is sympathetic to the experience of African Americans, depicting the daily discrimination Howell’s character endures.

Though it’s not overtly racist, the film has also been criticized in some academic circles for its lighthearted treatment of such a serious topic.

Chong’s character is eventually discovered to be the African American Harvard student from whom Howell’s character gained his scholarship.

[...] the ending has him paying her back, with interest, for his crime.

“It is adorable and it didn’t deserve it,” said Chong of the movie, which also starred James Earl Jones, Leslie Nielsen, Arye Gross, Melora Hardin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her third-ever film role.

Lee’s 1986 statements about the movie aren’t easy to find, but the director has acknowledged them, even re-upping his position in a conversation he recounted having with President Barack Obama when he revealed to Lee that the first movie he took Michelle Obama to was his own Do the Right Thing.