As we ponder the question of whether black football players would be willing to play for a St. Louis Rams team owned by Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh's "Barack the Magic Negro" song parody has been frequently cited one of the most significant, latest examples of Rush's racist attitudes and commentaries. It might behoove us, however, to recall the origins of the term itself, and as applied to President Obama.
We can start with Wikipedia:
The magical negro (sometimes called the mystical negro or magic negro) is a supporting, often mystical stock character in fiction who, by use of special insight or powers, helps the white protagonist get out of trouble.
Think Sidney Poitier, in nearly all of his movies. Or Morgan Freeman. According to Wiki, the term was popularized by none other than Spike Lee:
A new "phenomenon" has emerged in film in recent years, in which an African-American character is imbued with special powers, filmmaker Spike Lee told a student audience during a campus visit on Feb. 21.
But this new image is just a reincarnation of "the same old" stereotype or caricature of African Americans as the "noble savage" or the "happy slave" that has been presented in film and on television for decades, contended Lee.
During a master's tea with an audience of more than 200 students in the Calhoun College dining hall, Lee cited four recent films in which there is a "magical, mystical Negro" character: "The Family Man," "What Dreams May Come," "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and "The Green Mile." In the latter film, Lee noted, a black inmate cures a prison guard of disease simply by touching him; in "The Legend of Bagger Vance," a black man "with all these powers," teaches a young white male (played by actor Matt Damon), how to golf like a champion.
http://www.yale.edu/...
Early on in the 2007 Democratic Primary season, African-American writer David Ehrenstein published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times comparing the enthusiasm for Obama's Presidential campaign with the archetype of the Magic Negro:
But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic 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.
. . .
Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).
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.
So there you have it. From Spike Lee to the Los Angeles Times to Rush Limbaugh. Only in America!