[Vision2020] Obama the 'Magic Negro'

[keely emerinemix]

Have you ever in your life had an original thought?

While the article you lifted from Courtney's blog is interesting insofar as 
it dissects Hollywood's fascination with what other analyses have referred 
to as the "Black Savant Companion," I can't imagine why you care.  If, that 
is, I thought for a moment that you grasped the actual content and the 
meta-content.

Is it just that you thought saying "negro" would give you a thrill?

Most of us grew beyond looking up all the "dirty" words in the dictionary 
when we were about 7.  The steamliner of your maturity is drifting as far 
from the shore as the ship of your common sense and judgment.

keely


From: heirdoug at netscape.net
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Obama the 'Magic Negro'
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:52:21 -0400

The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, 
less-than-real black man.
By David Ehrenstein, L.A.-based DAVID EHRENSTEIN writes about Hollywood and 
politics.
March 19, 2007


AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, 
the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since 
making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in 
all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of 
being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

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 .

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.

As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such 
noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, 
Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And 
that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is 
"Magic."

Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he 
won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess 
Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these 
films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. 
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as 
it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

The same can't quite be said of Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Seven" and 
the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias 
to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, 
unlike Crothers in "The Shining," in which psychic premonitions inspire him 
to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. 
This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." The film's 
sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a 
slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what 
helping the white man gets you?

And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked 
by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the 
true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 
1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney 
Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, 
Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, 
vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his 
baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was 
astonished his underlings believed Hampton's whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no 
need for the accouterment of interracial "goodwill.")

But the same can't be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a 
noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's 
"real" fake son.

The senator's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge 
crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy 
goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved 
away, "magically." He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a 
bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an 
apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?

The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) 
concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling 
examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as 
an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" 
being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this 
sort of thing can be.

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).

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.
________________________________________________________________________
Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry-leading 
spam and email virus protection.


=======================================================
  List services made available by First Step Internet,
  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
                http://www.fsr.net
           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================

_________________________________________________________________
i'm making a difference. Make every IM count for the cause of your choice. 
Join Now. 
http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwme0080000001msn/direct/01/?href=http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=hmtagline