After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, an assimilationist agenda of sanitized black characters emerged. This trend headlined the "ebony saint"Â character, dominated by Sidney Poitier, who championed the cause of integration through the repeated portrayal of a friendly, desexualized black man who was little more than a nonthreatening confidant to virginal white women. This new figure became a positive new stereotype that historians and some contemporary critics referred to as "the Ideal Good Negro"Â or "the Noble Negro."Â
By the mid-1980s, mainstream black images a transformation as in The Cosby Show. Writers for the show avoided storylines that had anything to do with race or racism. In addition, other television shows and films often portrayed ultra-positive black characters, and many networks and studios tried to reproduce situation comedies or dramatic films of the same kind. By the late 1990s black characters entered a new stage of racial representation in what was called a "utopian reversal"Â of black representation.
It is out of such a milieu that the "Magic Negro"Â surfaced, a character surprisingly ignored by many critics. According to film critic Audrey Colombe, "This latest figuration in mainstream film, the magical black man, slipped into the '90s lineup without much popular comment."Â
The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture created to explain a cultural figure who has no past, but simply appears one day to help the white protagonists He's there to ease white "guilt"Â 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 coupling holds no interest (neutered).
Sidney Poitier set the tone for the Magic Negro in Lilies of the Field for which he won an Oscar, To Sir, With Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Morgan Freeman picked up the role in Driving Miss Daisy, Seven and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays surrogate protector to a white women bedeviled by a serial killers.
John Guaren portrayed white gullibility for the Magic Negro in his movie Six Degrees of Separation. The movie related the true story of David Hampton, a young, personable black gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier (surprise!). Though he started small, using the ruse to just to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless well-heeled New Yorker suckers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (ironically, one of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished others around him believed Hampton's BS).
White Americans' desire for a noble, healing Negro extends to Barak Obama who, in classic "liberal fashion, serves as Poitier's "real"Â fake son. Obama's initial fame had little to do with his political record (which was paltry) or what he's written in his two autobiographies (narcissist) or even what he's actually said in his long-winded bursts of hot air called speeches. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden reminded us, is "articulate."Â His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening. It is another example of "lefties"Â being deluded by style over substance, just as they were/are by the lighter-than-air abilities of JFK and his stooge brothers.
By the mid-1980s, mainstream black images a transformation as in The Cosby Show. Writers for the show avoided storylines that had anything to do with race or racism. In addition, other television shows and films often portrayed ultra-positive black characters, and many networks and studios tried to reproduce situation comedies or dramatic films of the same kind. By the late 1990s black characters entered a new stage of racial representation in what was called a "utopian reversal"Â of black representation.
It is out of such a milieu that the "Magic Negro"Â surfaced, a character surprisingly ignored by many critics. According to film critic Audrey Colombe, "This latest figuration in mainstream film, the magical black man, slipped into the '90s lineup without much popular comment."Â
The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture created to explain a cultural figure who has no past, but simply appears one day to help the white protagonists He's there to ease white "guilt"Â 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 coupling holds no interest (neutered).
Sidney Poitier set the tone for the Magic Negro in Lilies of the Field for which he won an Oscar, To Sir, With Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Morgan Freeman picked up the role in Driving Miss Daisy, Seven and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays surrogate protector to a white women bedeviled by a serial killers.
John Guaren portrayed white gullibility for the Magic Negro in his movie Six Degrees of Separation. The movie related the true story of David Hampton, a young, personable black gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier (surprise!). Though he started small, using the ruse to just to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless well-heeled New Yorker suckers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (ironically, one of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished others around him believed Hampton's BS).
White Americans' desire for a noble, healing Negro extends to Barak Obama who, in classic "liberal fashion, serves as Poitier's "real"Â fake son. Obama's initial fame had little to do with his political record (which was paltry) or what he's written in his two autobiographies (narcissist) or even what he's actually said in his long-winded bursts of hot air called speeches. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden reminded us, is "articulate."Â His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening. It is another example of "lefties"Â being deluded by style over substance, just as they were/are by the lighter-than-air abilities of JFK and his stooge brothers.
