I recently had an interesting and lively discussion with Dawno and Medievalist over Irish coffees in a Hilton bar about the Magical Negro phenomenon in fiction.

Here's a brief definition for those of you who weren't in the Hilton bar that evening.

Magical Negroes are always outwardly or inwardly disabled. They are either from a minority that is discriminated against, physically or mentally disabled, or social outcasts (drifters, the homeless, ex-cons)....whose magical minority-powers save the day. It also tends to raise the question that if the Magical Negro is so powerful and intelligent, why he's never saving the day, himself, instead of helping the mainstream hero to get all the glory. Also, quite often he's just ditched off or even killed after he's fulfilled his purpose for the plot.

We had some disagreement, as could be expected, over whether these stock characters were merely tropes, or actually characters in their own right; primarily, the discussion focused around which well-known black characters from books and film were and weren't Magical Negroes, and why.

Then, in one of those serendipitous coincidences that sometimes happen (remind me to post about my Indian Paintbrush Theory, sometime) a few days later Elizabeth Bear posted an entry mentioning the same thing. She wrote:

The clearest example of how this solution could work that I can think of off the top of my head is the so-called magical Negro, which is a phrase used to describe a situation where the (white) protagonist has a (black) mentor figure who is inevitably snuffed in the third reel. (You may substitute the Other of your choice in the magical Negro role, above: Apache shaman, wise old Jew, creepy witch woman, Inuit medicine man, cute nonthreatening gay best friend... you know the character, right?)

...the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film.

And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child. You only have one black guy in the movie? Oh, man, we know he's gonna die. Same thing with one queer guy (Heroic gays always die! It's a law! It's how you know they're heroic!). One woman is the love interest, and she will either stand by her man or betray him. And she might also die.

Wellllll....sort of. Other differences between Ben Kenobi and the Magical Negro are that Ben isn't a jobless, homeless wino. Or in prison. Or working as a janitor. And Ben has a past, alluded to as part of the back story; he doesn't simply appear, full-grown, with no explanation other than the protagonist's greater destiny is served by his presence. He also isn't the only character in the story who possesses mystical powers.

There's something rather more complicated to the actual Magical Negro trope, I think. It's not exactly the same as a token (disposable) sidekick of minority race or persuasion.

Here's another interesting thing: Magical Negro characters don't get to have sex. They aren't married, or romantically involved. They don't have children, or families, or real people who love them. This contrasts sort of strangely with the token queer character who does get to have sex -- even if only offstage -- who is in fact defined by the sex he has, and gets killed often apparently as a direct result.

I'm not quite sure what that means, other than exemplifying the further and specifically sexual threat of otherness and sexual stereotypes.

From the (pretty decent) Wikipedia entry on the subject:

...black characters with apparent supernatural powers who are portrayed as independent, who have a level of power roughly equivalent to that of other characters, and who are not subservient to whites — such as Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) in Star Wars, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in the Matrix series, and Storm (Halle Berry) in the X-Men — are not usually considered weakened magical negroes; nor are helpful non-white characters without some magical or fantastical element.[2]

...Even though they may play a central figure in a storyline, they are portrayed as being unable to solve challenges without the involvement of a white associate.

In other words, there's more at work here than ordinary tokenism -- plenty of which abounds.

The subservience of these characters works to ameliorate the subconscious sense of threat that their otherness might otherwise represent to the reader. The implication, then, is that the threat is justifiable, otherwise the need for the trope falls apart.

Let's look at Stephen King's John Coffey character, in The Green Mile. John Coffey is a childlike but extraordinarily powerful black man, wrongfully imprisoned (and shown more than once literally in shackles) who nonetheless exists, apparently, only to make the (white) characters' lives better, the protagonist and secondary white characters, both.

He's been imprisoned for a particularly horrific and brutal child rape/murder, of which he's innocent. He's physically large -- freakishly so, in fact. The reader knows intuitively and instinctively that the other characters in the novel are legitimately afraid of him. It doesn't have to be spelled out for us, because contextually, it's very clear: John Coffey is very big, and very black. In addition, he's caught weeping over the bodies; it's only natural for the characters to figure he's guilty of something horrible. Now, there's some sub-textual commentary happening, too, of course -- I think King clearly attempts to point out, "look, stereotypes bad..." especially in contrasting the messiah-like figure of John Coffey with the very clearly guilty, dangerous, and truly frightening (white) characters "Wild Bill" Wharton and Percy Wetlow. Unfortunately, it serves instead to underscore the fact that the real power in the novel lies in whiteness -- which John Coffey exists only to serve and never be.

It's clear that if John Coffey decided to stand up for himself and function independently, the white characters would be in deep trouble. Instead, though, he's a lawful good sort of a character. And lawful good, in his case, is defined as self-sacrifice to help out the apparently less-powerful-but-white characters -- even the legitimately convicted criminals -- with acts like curing urinary tract infections and restoring Mr. Jingles, the mouse that Percy the prison guard stomps to taunt one of the other prisoners.

Coffey's great power exists, apparently, only in the context of service of his white captors -- who, in turn, seem to bear no responsibility or culpability for his situation. Instead, they're absolved of their participation in his imprisonment and execution.

Strange Horizons ran an essay that provides an excellent overview of the device as used by Stephen King, online here.

In The Green Mile, Coffey is most gracious. "'You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,' John Coffey said. 'I know you been worrying, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss,'" he says near the end to Edgecomb. Coffey basically thanks his jailers who have not questioned his guilt until it's too late and done nothing to help him get out of jail (until Coffey cures the warden's wife) or even convince him to try.

None of this would have worked, if John Coffey had been a white Ben Kenobi character. We couldn't/wouldn't forgive Luke and Leia, had they participated in Ben's imprisonment, mental torture, and execution. For that matter, if the Coffey character had been female and black, even, the reader reaction to the culpable white characters would perhaps have been very different.

Rita Kempley, on The Black Commentator points out:

Cedric Robinson, author of "Black Marxism" and a colleague of Bobo's at UCSB, says, "Males, more problematic in the American imagination, have become ghostly. The black male simply orbits above the history of white supremacy. He has no roots, no grounding. In that context, black anger has no legitimacy, no real justification. The only real characters are white. Blacks are kind of like Tonto, whose name meant fool."

She goes on later to clarify, "It isn't that the actors or the roles aren't likable, valuable or redemptive, but they are without interior lives. For the most part, they materialize only to rescue the better-drawn white characters. Sometimes they walk out of the mists like Will Smith's angelic caddy in 'The Legend of Bagger Vance.' Thanks to Vance, the pride of Savannah (Matt Damon) gets his 'authentic swing' back."

It has to work that way, because that's the only way we can justify the treatment of these characters at the hands of the protagonists they exist to serve. If the Magical Negro isn't a shackled character in service, then he's too threatening to exist in the story.

From the Strange Horizons article linked earlier:

Here are what I call the Five Points of the Magical Negro; the five most common attributes:

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.
2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.
4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.
5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt. The white main character's well-being comes before the Magical Negro's because the main character is of more value, more importance.

Let me emphasize this part:
"The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt."

At risk of sounding like one of Bear's "3 % who are professionally offended" I think this is a key difference, and an important one. I honestly don't think the writers and filmmakers who employ the trope are inherently racist or bigoted, at least not any more than we're all steeped in that bigotry as products of our society. But I do think we all have a responsibility to identify, mock, and eradicate culturally embedded racism.

There's an inherent morality lesson built into thematic tropes that show up again and again. There's a thing that happens when certain characters always, always die. In the case of queer characters (Tara in season six BtVS, anyone?) the lesson comes across loud and clear, "see what happens to dykes and faggots? Get the message?" And in the case of the Magical Negro trope, it looks rather queasily, to me, like "the only really good nigger is a dead one."