Our tortured efforts to eliminate racism render us as absurd as ever
No question, 1989’s Back to the Future: Part II had incredible foresight, with a plot in which the bully Biff becomes a political tyrant — allegedly modelled on one Donald Trump. But when it came to predicting the future, a different Eighties film did better. If you’ve never heard of Soul Man, that’s not a surprise: this 1986 comedy about a white teenager who blacks up in order to blag a Harvard scholarship for African-Americans was deemed so offensive, even back then, that it damaged the careers of pretty much everyone involved. And yet it has proven astonishingly prescient.
