Let’s Hear It For Obama The Magic Negro In 2009
LIVE from New York, Fox News broadcasts the countdown to 2009, and a cheery message for Barack Obama:
“Let’s hope the Magic Negro does a good job – Jen and John C”
Fox bashers will jump on this and see it as sign of racism but the phrase was first used in connection with Obama by Hollywood writer David Ehrenstein in a March 2007 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that concluded:
“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.”
Not racism, just a lampooning of the latent racism that wants to see Obama as “our black”. Here’s the liberal telling the Jewish friend: “But you’re not like the other ones.”
Here’s “Barack the Magic Negro” by Paul Shanklin:
“Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper
Said he makes guilty whites feel good
They’ll vote for him, and not for me
‘Cause he’s not from the hood.”
The Magic Negro, who he?
The fabled “Magic Negro” in postmodern folk culture — a person “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.'”
So not an insult on Obama, but a satire on the kind of racism that means coffee-coloured singers get on and blue black-skinned ones do not. The racism that means the Muslim in the beard is less likely to get on TV than the Muslim in the suit.
Fox New is not in the wrong to broadcast the message. What is wrong, is that Americans are still working out how to laugh at Obama.
Can Obama be ridiculed. Yes he can. The thing to laugh at is not his race. Laugh at his glib phrases; his unfinished sentences; his youth; and his addresses that look like infomercials for debt consolidation.
But above all, please do make fun of his supporters…
Posted: 2nd, January 2009 | In: Key Posts, Politicians Comments (7) | TrackBack | Permalink
