Today’s LA Times carries an op-ed by David Ehrenstein that continues the “Obama’s not real” meme — this time, with a film industry twist:
But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the “Magic Negro.”
The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,” reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro [link repaired from the original].
Unlike Mr. Ehrenstein, Polimom’s not a film / entertainment industry afficionado. Thus, I cannot confirm or deny a relationship between Brown v. BoE (1954) and the “appearance” of “The Magic Negro”. Literature, however, has examples of presumably stereotypical African-Americans in positive, secondary roles that long predate Brown… by nearly 100 years.
Bill Drock’s Investment, for instance, was an 1869 temperance movement story by Mary Dwinell Chellis, in which a young white man (the protagonist) is saved by Bill Drock — a black man who is one of two supporting characters. (The other is white.)
He’s there to assuage white “guilt” (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.
Sigh….
“The scary black men are going to deflower our delicate Southern virgins” was a post-Reconstruction Era strawman. Constructed in the wake of a lost war, it answered the needs of politically emasculated White Southern Men, and dramatically influenced the ensuing hostilities in race relations.
Do some people still buy that tripe? No doubt. Can it be generalized to “white people”? No more than any other stereotypical hogwash.
The number of fantasties that have been indulged over the course of this nation’s psychotic race-relations history is quite amazing, actually… and Ehrenstein’s piece merely gives voice to yet another: that white people need benign, unreal black role-players because they are both guilty about (and for) — and afraid of — the reality.
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
If he were real? What the heck is real, particularly when viewed through a warped cinematography lens? The problem isn’t how films have portrayed positive images; it’s the entertainment industry’s fixation on the negative.
That’s the stereotype Obama doesn’t match — but that doesn’t make him not “real”.
(h/t: Captain Ed via Dear Husband.)
[…] More here at Polimom Says. […]
This is just… wierd. Can nobody find something relevant, like his stand on an issue (any issue… just pick one) to write about?
~EdT.
David Ehrenstein is strange and is venturing beyond his usual field, the history of gays in Hollywood. This reads more like his usual writings: a film or literary review or an interview where he asks questions based on his unique philosophical view of art history.
David and the Magic Negro, bah, piffle!
My problem with the Wiki article came when I got to the examples. I was willing to go along with it until then. In movies especially, I don’t think it is so much that the characters are black and made subservient to a white protagonist, as much as it is that a story is written, and several of the main characters are white. Then either the author or editor, or someone who reviews it along the way brings up that there needs to be some diversity in the characters, so they make one of the secondary people black.
[…] The Obama the ‘Magic Negro’ LA Times piece by David Ehrenstein has created quite a bit of buzz– so much so that a couple of friends forwarded it to me. I’ve avoided the “how Black is he” meme and don’t want to wade too deep into it now. From Ehrenstein’s article: Obama’s fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he’s written in his two (count ‘em) books, or even what he’s actually said in those stem-winders. It’s the way he’s said it that counts the most. It’s his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is “articulate.” His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn’t called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media). […]
[…] Media Matters has an item up about Rush the Mighty Limbaugh (doo, doo doo doo), in which he criticizes (at length) Ehrenstein’s “Magic Negro” piece in the LA Times. (My earlier post on that op-ed here)… and I find myself in at least partial agreement with el Limbaugh. […]