Talk:magical Negro

Is a magical Negro always black-skinned? Just noticed that the def doesn't mention skin colour at all. Equinox ◑ 17:29, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Good point. Although I can find a single cite of "a white Magical Negro", I think the trope is definitionally black, and can only be used of a white character if the whiteness is explicitly spelled out like that (alienans).

• 2014 July 31, Oliver C. Speck, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 259:

  ... character toiling for the salvation of black slaves in Django Unchained. The film offers an ideological view of American slavery that likely will comfort white audiences in the present day. With a white Magical Negro protagonist, […]

I tweaked the definition. - -sche (discuss) 21:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Outside cinema

I tweaked the definition to say "especially" (but not only) American cinema, since it also sees use in reference to characters in comic books, other books, and even the real world:

• 2011 April 30, John Wright, The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo & Racism, Potomac Books, Inc., →ISBN, page 27:

  Barack the magic negro: How Racism oozes from extremists into mainstream media Darkness cannot drive out darkness; ... 2007, that Obama was reminiscent of a stereotypical benevolent “Magic Negro” who is “like a comic book super hero,” […]

• 2012 April 11, Robert P. Watson, Jack Covarrubias, Tom Lansford, The Obama Presidency: A Preliminary Assessment, State University of New York Press, →ISBN, page 31:

  The Magic Negro is a comic-book superhero who can resolve all issues in a rational and calm manner. The Magic Negro trope uses an unthreatening rhetoric, refuses to stoop to name calling, and is approachable but not in the way the Dandy […]

• 2014 December 15, Susanne C. Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Fordham Univ Press, →ISBN:

  Uncle Tom can be seen as a prototype of what is known as the “magic negro” in American literature and film. The term is primarily used by critics to denounce the simplistic and stereotypical ways in which majority writers and directors […]

• 2018 April 1, Martha J. Cutter, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, University of Georgia Press, →ISBN, page 119:

  His essay, “Everybody's Graphic Protest Novel,” argues that Cruse's book is replete with such “magic Negro" figures that guide the white Toland through his developing political and social consciousness." They include Les, his first male […]

- -sche (discuss) 21:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)