Attention all white people:
Barack Obama is not Magic.
And, also, but: offered as a corollary:
Just because he's not Magic, doesn't make him No Good.
Get it?
No?
Read on.
I'm not black. Fairly pinkish, really. Raised by a white single mother who dated men of African descent, among others, had a taste for blues musicians with a bad-boy streak, and raised me with an ear for RnB, Soul, Funk, Jazz and even Hip-Hop, though she was the alabaster spitting image of Debbie Harry, maybe Marylin Monroe (or so I'm told).
But yeah, still: I'm not black. So this one's for all the folks of less recent African heritage (for those whose melanin got left back at the Olduvai Gorge): Whiteys, primarily, in other words. But everyone's welcome at this party.
The Magic Negro.
Did you ever see that movie The Green Mile? You know, the unremittingly corny, insultingly patronizing crapfest starring Tom Hanks? I remember it. I remember it well, because it was that movie, specifically that movie's depiction of the giant cuddly Magic Negro Who Saves All The Good White People With His Magic He Saved Up Just For Them that I finally understood a particular dimension of our unique American insanity: namely, the Magic / Evil dichotomy we (white people) use to sort out Black people in our culture.
It's not merely in the mind of Stephen King (though King seems to have big love for the Magic Negro -- e.g. the Shining, Talisman, and maybe others -- but I digress). Remember the Matrix? Lots of Magic Negroes: Morpheus, the magician who saves Neo, the whitish man, and trains him in his Magic. Why? Because Neo, the more-or-less white dude, was the Savior of the World. Morpheus, the excellent genius behind it all? Not the Savior. Just a Magic Negro. Oh, and that soothsaying lady. Very Magical Negro. Inscrutable, profound. But also: not the Savior. See, only the white-like guy gets that job.
And so, what's the opposite of the Magic Negro? I mean, every African American in the pop-culture imagination can't be Magic. Can they? Oh, no. Not at all. Hell. No.
No, the opposite of the Magic Negro is just about every other Black caricature ever portrayed by Hollywood, the ones that made Chuck D and Flava Flav want to burn the whole mess down: the criminal, the pimp, the thug, the murderer. Those are the categories we reserve for Black folks who don't want to happily give us all their power.
But what of our Black Athletes, our sports professionals? Surely they don't fit in these categories. I mean, surely we treat them with some sort of balanced, realistic, respectful view. Right? I mean, we never idolize them inhumanly until they do some sort of, you know, human-type thing, and then throw them to the dogs, abandon them, cast them out, humiliate them, excoriate them, revile them -- none of that stuff, right? We don't do that to them.
Right?
Hell yes we do. Because our athletes are supremely Magical Negroes. Totally in a world of their own, performing superhuman feats. For our pleasure. Until they displease us. At which point, they are no longer Magic.
They are Evil.
And there's nothing in between.
And, so, benheeha: what about our politicians? I mean, they're kind of larger than life, right? But they're also kind of Serious. Right? We would never do this to a Black Politician, right? The stakes are so high. We, the well-meaning white people that we are, would never elevate one of our most talented and intelligent politicians of any race to an unrealistic and -- dare I say it -- Magic standard or perfection? And imbue in him every hope for our salvation, every hope for the absolution and redemption of our shared history, every hope for the dreams of our children to live in a world in which we don't have to be afraid of Black folks anymore? Would we do that?
Moreover: would we then, given the smallest imperfection, the smallest blemish, the slightest scratch or dent on our dream vehicle to Salvation: would we then claw him off of his celestial pedestal down to the muck and mire, the dark hole in our psyches we reserve for the No Good? Would we pinion him there under the spears of our pride and scorn and outrage at his sheer human-beingness, a human beingness that he's not allowed:
Complexity. The quality we prize in other white people. You know what I'm talking about: like Hillary, right? I mean, we kind of like that she can fight dirty, you know? It makes her interesting, maybe even exciting. She's like Tony Soprano. A complex character. Mixing, you know, good and bad qualities. He does things we really disagree with, but hey: he's a fascinating guy. So we like him. Despite it all. And many of us like Hillary like that. A lot of people feel that way -- in good faith, I kid you not -- about McCain as well: "The Maverick". He doesn't follow the rules. Kind of like Dirty Harry. Who we also like. White people, I mean.
So, to sum up: white folks do naughty things, and that makes them complex, interesting people. Black folks do naughty things, even things that sometimes aren't even that naughty...and we want to lock them up and throw away the key. We want to burn their houses down. We want to make them disappear, after dragging them through the gauntlet of our calumny. Because we don't allow complex, fault-ridden, all too human beings to have a richness of melanin. Oh, no. We don't like that. If they refuse to be Magic for us; if they refuse to stay up on that pedestal we hoist them up on; if they refuse to play the game: well, we can't have that.
Because otherwise African Americans would be human, REALLY human, just like us. Equal to us. REALLY equal to us. And then we might not get to keep all the stuff.
So, in the next few months before Barack Obama, that Pretty Motherf*cker, that beautiful, intelligent, fantastic, flawed human being -- you know, the guy you used to love a few months ago -- before that man becomes our next President through the sheer content of his character and the ferociousness of his determination: in these next few months, lets wipe the Magic from our eyes and take a hard look at the man. This man, who is our best hope to have a truly great American President that Americans need right now, who embodies who we are and who we want to be: lets get real with ourselves, let's get real about what's real and what's not real, let's honestly, truly believe in America and the equality our Founding Fathers wanted us to have but didn't have the courage to give us all five fifths of, let's give this man the recognition of his fantastic humanness in all its dimensions and not waver. Because this is it. This is the time. The time is now.
Hope.
UPDATE: thanks to gooners for this Wiki link on the Magic Negro. Good to know it's not all in my mind.