I think this essay may shed more light on what exactly David Ehrenstein meant when he used the term in his op-ed piece for the LA Times.
You might also want to take a look at the Wikipedia page on the term "Magical Negro."
Dave Chappelle had a magic negro skit on his show a few times.
A Black man that truly wishes he had been born White.
This is everywhere, you can only portray black people as the best examples of humanity.
Every commercial with white and blacks will NEVER portray the black person as the one who doesn’t know about the great product the commercial is about. The doofus in a commercial can NEVER be a black person.
Most commercials show happy, succesful, black families as end users, as if showing white families would be an old racist Ozzie & Harriett sterotype.
This black as conscience, all knower, truth seeker is in every movie, tv show, commercial, etc.
God forbid there is a parody about less than perfect black people like there was In Living Color and Chappelle.
If In Living Color or Chappelles show were made by white people there would have been lunatic hysterics instead of the typical complaining we got.
Look at “24” the black president is the even tempered messiah where the white VP is ready to nuke the world. His sister is the keeper of the constitution against the devils who want the Muslim internment camps.
Find me a corportate website or a billboard, print ad, etc. WITHOUT a black person or family even though they are 12% of the population.
The over representation and PANDERING is embarassing.
I don’t see Obama as a “magical negro.”
The white urban liberals may want him to fit that role, and he might morph into it, but he isn’t one now, and clearly wasn’t one before the money men appealed to his vanity and stoked his presidency fantasy. Before, he made jokes about white politicians dancing at black churches which were very funny.
“magic Negro,” a term that dates back to the late 1950s, around the time Sidney Poitier sacrifices himself to save Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.”
Sidney Poitier was a Godsend in Lilies of the Field. Sent to build the “shapel”.
South Park played it up in the '05 season when Cartman, in his effort to rid South Park of hippies, required Chef to sacrifice himself.
"Die Hippy Die"
Chef, the Magic Negro, says farewell as he prepares to save the white people.
...now that was one funny movie.
This is all media hype and spin for diversity in an effort to make the coming anointing of Mr. B. Hussein Obama as the next POTUS with the guilt trip that only he will mend all our differences and unite the country liberals and conservatives holding hands signing Kum-Bayh-Yah.....
African americans, and native americans might be the only 2 american ethnic groups that get this "mystical" type ot treatment status, as generally the all wise, all knowing full of wisdom character is usually some kind of foreginer.
Washington mutual does this to an EXTREME RACITS level in their commercials.
They have a “magic negro” stereotype with a coral of old white men bankers with the “magic negro” stereotype giving words of wisdom to bank custormers.
If the role was reversed we would hear demands from the usual race baiters for the lynchings of the commercials producers.
I wonder if this author would like it better if the god-like figure were white and the hapless mortal were black?
Don't forget Whoopi's "magic" roles as
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It fits on another level as well, modern practices of the “religious” are most comfortable when they have god in his neat little box, there to visit when they need and there to witness for their piety to their critics.
Sorry, but I didn’t see Queen Latifah in BDTH as a Magic Negro. Rather her character was more like “Kitten With A Whip” meets “You’ve Got Mail.”