Stupidity Knows No Color

Some people are making fun of David Ehrenstein (whom I've met) and the LA Times for the piece on Barack Obama and the "Magic Negro." However, it's not the phrase they should be mocking, but the content.

The concept of the "Magic Negro"--a modern (how modern no one can agree) folk figure, a black man (usually in a movie) who comes on the scene with no past to help a white character--is too vague to have much meaning. For instance, some of these movies that allegedly fit the pattern, usually older ones (and usually created by earnest liberals) try to deal, directly or indirectly, with race relations--The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Six Degrees Of Separation. (The latter film is so self-aware that the whole concept of a "magic Negro" is being played with, not unwittingly reenacted.) Most, especially nowadays, don't.

In the majority of modern cases, it's simply a black man playing a supporting role that a white man could (and usually does) play. The social critics who feel superior enough to bandy about this phrase apparently can't see beyond color and want to place a burden on black actors, while the audience at large, with its more tolerant and open view, simply shrugs it off.

The whole article is pretty silly, but I think my favorite moment is this:

[Scatman] Crothers in The Shining, in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows [...] get[s] killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's Elephant. The film's sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down.

Let's ignore his race-conscious reading of Elephant and ask Ehrenstein to watch The Shining again. Crother's death is already a parody. Director Stanley Kubrick goes to great lengths to get Crothers into the haunted hotel just to have him killed immediately for no particularly good reason.

P.S. The Shining is such an old movie I'm giving my spoiler alert after the fact.