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Soul Man is a 1986 American film featuring C. Thomas Howell as Mark Watson a pampered rich college graduate who uses ‘tanning pills’ in order to qualify for a Graduate school scholarship to Harvard Law only available to African American students. He expects to be treated as a fellow student and instead learns the isolation of ‘being black’ on campus. Mark Watson later befriends and falls in love with the original candidate of the scholarship, a single mother who works as a waitress to support her education. The character later ‘comes out’ as white, leading to the famous defending line "Can you blame him for the color of his skin?"

The film was met with vast criticism of a white man donning black face to humanize white ignorance at the expense of African American viewers. Despite a large box office intake, has scored low on every film critic platform. "A white man donning blackface is taboo," said C Thomas Howell "Conversation over — you can't win. But our intentions were pure: We wanted to make a funny movie that had a message about racism."

A Mighty Heart is a 2007 American film featuring Angelina Jolie playing Marianne Pearl, the wife of the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Marianne Pearl is of multi-racial descent, born from a Dutch-Jewish father and an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother. She personally cast Angelina Jolie is play herself, defending the choice to have Jolie “sporting a spray tan and a corkscrew wig.”

Mixed criticism of the film came in large part for the choice to have Angelina Jolie portray a woman of color in face make up and curly wig portraying Marianne Pearl. Defense of the casting choice was in large part due Pearl’s mixed racial heritage, critics claimed it would have been impossible to find an Afro-Latina actress with the same crowd drawing caliber of Angelina Jolie. Director Michael Winterbottom defended his casting choice in an interview, “To try and find a French actress who’s half-Cuban, quarter-Chinese, half-Dutch who speaks great English and could do that part better — I mean, if there had been some more choices, I might have thought, ‘Why don’t we use that person?’ … I don’t think there would have been anyone better.”

Trading Places a 1993 American film, telling the elaborate story of a commodities banker and street hustler crossing paths after being made part of a bet. The film features a scene between Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Denholm Elliott, and Dan Aykroyd when they must don disguises to enter a train. For no reason relevant to the plot Dan Aykroyd’s character puts on full black face make up, a dread locked wig and a Jamaican accent to fill the position of a Jamaican pot head. The film has received very little criticism for its use of racial and Ethnic stereotype, Rotten Tomatoes even citing it as "featuring deft interplay between Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, Trading Places is an immensely appealing social satire."