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:
“What art can paint or gild any object in afterlife with the glow which Nature gives to the first baubles of childhood. St. Peter’s cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed. How the imagination cleaves to the warm glories of that tinsel even now! What entertainments make every day bright and short for the fine freshman!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I respect the ways of old folks, but the blood of a rooster or a goat cannot turn the seasons, change the course of the clouds and fill them up with water like bladders. The other night, at the ceremony for Legba, I danced and sang my fill: I am a black man, no? and I enjoyed it like a true Negro should. When the drums beat, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, I feel the itch in my hips and up and down my legs, I have got to join the party. But that is all.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)