The Magical Negro is a supporting stock character in American cinema who is portrayed coming to the aid of a film's white protagonists. These characters, who often possess special insight or mystical powers, have been a long tradition in American fiction.
Many within the African-American community in the United States now express unhappiness about the ongoing use of such magical characters. In 2001, Spike Lee, while discussing films with students at Washington State University and at Yale University, said he was dismayed at Hollywood's decision to continue using the premise; he noted the 2000 film The Legend of Bagger Vance now used the "super-duper magical Negro".
In a Sept. 26, 2012, essay in Time Magazine about President Obama's re-election, author and TV personality Touré argued: "While some may think it complimentary to be considered 'magical,' it is infantilizing and offensive because it suggests black excellence is so shocking it can only come from a source that is supernatural."
Critics use "negro" because its modern usage is now considered to be archaic and sometimes offensive. This underlines their message that a "magical black character" who goes around selflessly helping white people is an archetypal racial throwback to stereotypes such as the "Sambo" or "Noble savage".
Famous quotes containing the words magical and/or negro:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)