Magic but not Human

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:01:00 -0600

Another day, another racial flap in American politics. This week the subject is a disc of conservative joke songs including the track Barack the Magic Negro, a rendition of Puff the Magic Dragon.

News stories are playing out along tried and true lines: phony outrage and “I’m not racist defenses”. We’ve gone through this story a million times, and never grown from it.

The song in question may or may not be racist, may or may not be funny or may or may not be stupid, or all of the above, but it provides the opportunity to have a real conversation about race. So far, it’s not happening. We’re going to get angry at each other, and nothing will change.

This is the important part: “magic negro” is a real term. It comes to the satirical song in question from a column in the LA Times, written by an African-American film critic named David Ehrenstein, who in turn references a stock figure in movies—the wise, exotic, and subservient or handicapped black man or woman who materializes to impart wisdom or power to the white characters (like the blind Oracle in the Matrix movies).

The phrase is intentionally and offensively anachronistic, because “magic negro” characters reproduce the black-person-as-child trope in American culture. The phrase is offensive because phony exotic respect is offensive.

Ehrenstein:

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.

Republicans are getting raked over the coals over this song, and probably with some justice, but for the wrong reasons: because they've attacked an African American political opponent with an offensive word.

Democrats and others doing the raking should use the moment to ask: can we allow Obama to be a real human, and if so, can we kill off our need for these exotic fantasies?

Urbana.org All Things New Blog - cinema

Magic but not Human