Caroline? is an obscure made-for-TV movie with a one-paragraph plot summary on Wikipedia that completely leaves out anything substantive.
Wikipedia says "Caroline" shows up just before a large inheritance is due, but my memory of the movie is that the concern of the person claiming to be Caroline isn't money. It's the fate of two minor children in a wealthy, dysfunctional family.
The majority of the movie focuses on the drama involved in inserting herself in their lives successfully, gaining their trust and establishing the ability to meaningfully help them. They are probably Winston and Heidi in the list of characters on Wikipedia.
Heidi is presumed to be retarded. She's actually hard of hearing and being treated like a baby doll and dressed up in cutesy clothes like she's still four years old and she absolutely hates it.
The fake Caroline initially thinks she can help Winston and then Heidi but ultimately concludes she needs to help Heidi and that will free up Winston.
There is a short scene at the end of the movie showing Heidi as an adult woman in charge of the school for special needs kids she now runs that I think "Caroline" founded. Her and Winston talk about how they kept Caroline's secret that she was a fraud and they are grateful she helped them.
Claudius was a Roman emperor who was appointed emperor by the Praetorian Guard after they assassinated Caligula. He was appointed emperor in spite of the fact that everyone believed he was "a retard."
He had a stammer and a limp and drooled on himself, so he was the only remaining living male relative of a paranoid fruitcake who killed anyone he felt threatened by.
Following the death of Caligula, he stopped drooling on himself and shocked everyone by proving to be a competent Emperor. He ruled for nearly fourteen years instead of being soon replaced by someone else like people probably expected given what they thought of him.
George W. Bush was ragged on for his speech impediment, but I know of no evidence that speech impediments have any correlation at all to intelligence. MASH did a nice episode covering stuttering and that it doesn't say anything about intelligence. Here is a short clip covering highlights from that episode.
My oldest son is twice exceptional. He's got big strengths and big weaknesses.
He has said that as a child, he was slow on the uptake socially and his first reply to social stuff often made him sound stupid but then he often did figure it out shortly thereafter. Sometimes by the time he realized what was going on, he chose to double down on playing stupid and basically went "Teacher, I just a kid. I don't understand your instructions for how to stick my hand in your bear trap. Can you SHOW me how to stick your hand in the bear trap? Because I just don't understand."
As far as I know, he didn't do stuff like that to me because I had his best interests at heart. But a lot of special needs kids are treated extremely abusively and most likely many of them are smarter than people think and like Claudius, they play dumb to survive.
Here's a clip from The Mentalist, a show I never saw, with a killer covering his crimes by playing like he's mentally handicapped. So I'm probably not the only person who knows playing dumb can get you out of stuff and some people do that.
The Wikipedia page for Finding Forrester seems to contain zero mention of racial elements to the plot. A search for the words black, white, Caucasian, African, race and racial turns up nothing relevant to racial social dynamics.
In the Bronx, sixteen-year-old Jamal Wallace downplays his potential as a gifted student, preferring to play basketball with his friends.
Jamal Wallace is a Black or African American kid downplaying his intelligence because the African American community has enormous baggage concerning education. Not every single Black American is descended from slaves but most are and slaves were forbidden by law from learning to read.
Furthermore, the world over, oppressed "working class" populations are typically untrusting of the better-educated upper classes who frequently use their education and privilege to manipulate and take advantage of people they mistakenly believe are dumb because of their lack of formal education and lack of social status.
An extreme example of this kind of abuse is found in the Nestle Infant Formula Scandal where the Nestle corporation wanted to wash its hands of killing babies by claiming their marketing people were not responsible for those deaths because the formula had clear instructions in English on the container, and LA LA LA NOT listening to the relevance of the fact that they were trying to force poorly educated women in countries where English wasn't the dominant language to buy formula, like it or not, by giving them FREE formula just long enough to let their breast milk dry up, imagining they would have no choice but to get a job and pay for formula. And the courts went "SEEMS LEGIT! We pronounce you college educated depraved monsters NOT GUILTY!"
(SARCASM) I CANNOT imagine why Black Americans don't TRUST the predominantly WHITE education industry. What an unfathomable MYSTERY. (/SARCASM)
I have firsthand experience with people who aren't formally educated and don't trust or like people with a lot of college or whatever. My father was a high school drop out who taught ROTC at a college and was openly hostile to people with formal education, especially if he felt they were getting over in some way. I've talked a bit about that before.
Jamal Wallace gets a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Wikipedia says nothing about the fact that it's a White school and because it says nothing whatsoever about the racial elements of the story, I cannot figure out a means to readily fact check if Jamal Wallace is literally the only Black kid or just very much in the minority. My impression is he's the only Black kid in the entire school.
Wallace attracts the ire of Crawford, a teacher at the school who likes to bully his students and treat them like they are stupid. In this clip Crawford asks Wallace "Are you challenging me?"
My point is that if you are handicapped and being mistreated, the wrong skin color or social class or being presumed to be stupid because of a speech impediment or similar, it's not only in your best interest to play dumb, it can be downright dangerous to defy the assumptions people are making about you and prove otherwise.
I had firsthand experience with the classist assholes of Metafilter refusing to ever treat me better no matter how much I proved that I wasn't dumb or uneducated like they wanted to believe. I was homeless, they were intentionally abusive to me and liked to brag about what wonderful, high-minded ethical people they were making the world a better place and do not confuse them with the facts.
I've talked before about some of the challenges with trying to assess intelligence and the difference between things like education (actually knowing your stuff) and credentials (being able to readily get other people to THINK you know your stuff, whether true or not). For example:
If a person is in a vulnerable position and being mistreated and is successfully playing dumb to protect themselves, how dumb are they really?
This is a rampant problem the world over because their abusers consistently want to justify their abusive bullshit and, like Metafilter did to me, will almost always double down on the abuse rather than admit they were factually wrong about someone and morally wrong for how they treated them.
The more people involved in this conspiracy to agree that one person is everyone's whipping boy or girl, the harder it is to insist that they never deserved such abuse to begin with. And this means large numbers of people will all enthusiastically agree that X is TRUE about someone to justify their abuse no matter how ridiculous the claim.
And never mind that nothing whatsoever actually justifies abuse and it shouldn't have been done even if X had been true.