***SPOILERS*** What looks like a re-make of the ground breaking movie "Gentelmen's Aggrement" about a gentile reporter posing as a Jew in order to get the info on anti-Semitism in America the film "Black like Me" has white Texas reporter John Horton, James Whitmore, go the full nine yards in making himself look black to write a in depth story about racism in America. That with Horton taking massive amounts of skin blackening pills and countless hours of sun lamp treatments to look black and blend in with the black population in the deep south and see just how it is to be one of them.
Horton despite his black skin doesn't have any black or African features which make him look very out of place. His blackness keeps changing from dark to medium to light throughout the film without anyone in the cast ever noticing it! There's also Horton's perfect English speaking voice, like that of a collage professor, that at times, unlike his artificial black skin, almost gives him away to both the blacks as well as whites that he associates with in the movie. Still in trying to find out the black experience Horton does suffer discrimination among whites for being black as well as blacks, at the end of the movie, for being white when it's discovered that he's really white not black. In fact it was the resentment that Horton got from his former black friends that was far worse then from whites despite that he was on their side of the issues!
One of the strangest encounters that Horton had in the movie is when he was befriended by a white collage student Charles Maynard, Alan Bergmann, who was doing his PHD dissertation on black/white relations in America. Having a few drinks in his hotel room a drunk and uninhibited Maynard ,to Horton's total disgust, tried to make a drunken pass on Horton as well as have him show or compare his, for a better word , manhood with that of his own! Horton seeing that he's dealing not with a serious student on the subject of race relations but a die in the wool, far worse then even a racist, sexual degenerate almost ended up strangling Maynard who pleaded for his life by claiming that he's not a "queer"!.
By the time the film was over Horton came to realize that the differences between the races wasn't just the color of their skin but the ingrained attitudes that they, like himself, had developed about each other over the years ever since they were almost out of their cribs. Going back to the "White World" from where he came from Horton slowly began to realize that just by him being black doesn't quite cut it in either the black or white communities in America. It's understanding that their is a difference between the two in not only color but lifestyles and environment-besides being discriminated against- which most liberals like himself are blind to and have completely overlooked!
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