What Started the "Magic" Furor

After I linked (in my last post) to the David Ehrenstein column that led us to the "Magic Negro" furor of the last few days, I decided to take some time really reading and digesting what Mr. Ehrenstein wrote. What I found was so sickening that I felt that it really needed further exposure.

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.

OK - right off the bat - anyone who takes Wikipedia as a definitive source on ANYTHING needs to have their heads examined. I mean I do use Wikipedia, but never as a sole source and rarely as a main source. There are too many flaws with Wikipedia that really prevents such reliance!

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."

Oh so the reason that these gentlemen succeeded had NOTHING to do with their wonderful talents and was only due to the over active angst of white folk? And they call Limbaugh the racist here?????

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.

Morgan Freeman has to be one of my favorite contemporary American actors. The underlying calm dignity that he brings to every role he plays shines through even the most villainous villains that he has ever played (and he has played a couple) or in the comedic turns he has taken on the silver screen. To oversimplify the acting "chops" that this man has by calling it all "an inferior substitute" is highly insulting to say the least.

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.

Clearly Warhol was secure enough to not need artificial trappings of "interracial goodwill" and had the nerver to call a fake a fake! What this country needs is more people like Andy Warhol who are willing to step up and call this fake what it is.

Imagine, if you will, the reactions of the left if Rush Limbaugh had said the following.

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.

But since it came from one of their own their silence was deafening.