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This was intended to be a short piece about how Chip Saltsman distributed a CD with the political parody "Barack the Magic Negro" set to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and how people were angry at him and Mike Duncan at the RNC got his days-of-the-week panties in a bunch, but I decided that to write something short and sweet was a) impossible for me to do and b) an insult to the intellectual integrity of this issue.
In March of 2007, LA Times columnist David Ehrenstein wrote a piece titled "Barack the 'Magic Negro'" subtitled "The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man."
Before we go any further, let's pause the crazy train and reflect on that for a moment, shall we?
Perhaps I'm just being silly, but it almost sounds as though Ehrenstein said that President-Elect Barack Obama is not a real black man. I mean, being that I'm not black myself (indigenous American ancestry actually, listed on the Dawes-Miller rolls and among the dead on the Trail of Tears) I'm not quite sure of other requisites for being black other than the color of one's skin, but perhaps Ehrenstein knows something that I do not. I also understand that he's comparing Obama to this caractiture and therein lies the problem.
Ehrenstein went on to say that there is a "magic negro" syndrome in Hollywood in which black men are always these angelic humans free of all wrong-doing, who are here on earth to save white people. I'll forgive Ehrenstein for ignoring how Indigenious Americans are only cast in such roles, along with older, black women ("The Matrix" anyone? "How to Make an American Quilt?" "Poltergeist?" et al.).
Let's take the crazy train on down the line to one month after the Ehrenstein piece, when political satirist Paul Shanklin recorded a song about the issue, for use by Rush Limbaugh. Ehrenstein completely goes off his own rails around the eighth graph, but comes back around to coherency with this:
"The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg ...
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."
Ehrenstein finishes:
"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."
It's almost impossible not to assume that Ehrenstein is defining Obama with his earlier definition of "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."
I didn't even vote for Obama but after reading this I'm pissed off for him, honestly. I realize that Ehrenstein neither coined this historical phrase nor is writing
about it it he same vein as Paul Shanklin; it's how with one column
Ehrenstein attempts to rain on Obama's parade by ignoring the man's achievements (I've said they were few for the office which he sought, but more than most and greater than Ehrenstein's), the historic precedence Obama set with his campaign, and tried to neuter the scope of this achievement by brushing it off as nothing more than a penance of "white guilt." I find that insulting.
Even more so - many people for whom I care about voted for Obama. That Ehrenstein suggests their motivation for doing so is attributed to the above referenced is offensive. Everyone that I know who voted for Obama did so because they felt he was the more qualified candidate - race aside - which is what I thought we as a nation were striving for with regards to equality. They did not vote for him because hey! What better way to make up for past inequality than by voting for the first viable black presidential candidate that comes along, validity aside? To do such seems to me racist still.
Those usually offended by such things as the suggestions in Ehrenstein's column were silent.
All aboard, the train chugs away.
I'm not
