Catchword: magic nigger

Filed under: English, Entertainment, Race, Derogatory

Part of speech: n.

Quotation: I first heard a variation of this term after seeing the film “Clara’s Heart” with a friend about a decade ago. In this 1988 drama, Whoopi Goldberg played a Jamaican maid who transforms the lives of a well-to-do white Maryland family. The family is completely falling apart until Clara, with her honeyed patois and no-nonsense emotions, comes on the scene to set everything right. It’s a backbreakingly earnest and irritating film, which led my friend to utter a phrase I never forgot: “Damn, I can’t stand them “magic [Negro]” movies,” she hissed, although in the heat of the moment, she didn’t use the word “Negro.”…(A celluloid flip side of the Magic Negro is the White Savior, wherein a white crusader manages to save all the cowering black folks from really, really bad white people, as seen in such films as “Mississippi Burning” or “Ghosts of Mississippi.”)

Article or Document Title:
“The Myth Of The ‘Magic Negro’”

Author:
Renee Graham

Article, document, publication, web site:
Boston Globe

Publishing location:
Massachusetts

Date of publication:
Dec. 7, 1999

Page number:
E5

This cite belongs to a full entry for magic Negro.