What is a Magical Negress you ask?

Posted by jamilaj. in Uncategorized and tagged with , , ,

Welcome to magicalnegress.wordpress.com.

You may be wondering what the heck a magical Negress is and you have every right to know.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Magical Negro, or magical African-American friend, is a supporting stock character in American cinema, who, by use of special insight or powers, helps the white protagonist.[1]

African-American filmmaker Spike Lee popularized the term, deriding the archetype of the “super-duper magical Negro”[2] in 2001 while discussing films with students at Washington State University and at Yale University.[3][4] The word “Negro“, now considered by many as archaic and sometimes offensive, is used intentionally to suggest that the archetype is a racial throwback, an update of the “Sambo” and “Noble savage” stereotypes.[5]


The Magical Negro is typically but not always “in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social constraint,” often a janitor or prisoner.[6] He has no past; he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist.[7][8] He usually has some sort of magical power, “rather vaguely defined but not the sort of thing one typically encounters.”[7] He is patient and wise, often dispensing various words of wisdom, and is “closer to the earth.”[3]

The Magical Negro serves as a plot device to help the protagonist get out of trouble, typically through helping the white character recognize his own faults and overcome them.[3] Although he has magical powers, his “magic is ostensibly directed toward helping and enlightening a white male character.”[6] “These powers are used to save and transform disheveled, uncultured, lost, or broken whites (almost exclusively white men) into competent, successful, and content people within the context of the American myth of redemption and salvation.”[9] It is this feature of the Magical Negro that some people find most troubling. Although from a certain perspective the character may seem to be showing blacks in a positive light, he is still ultimately subordinate to whites. He is also regarded as an exception, allowing white America to “like individual black people but not black culture.”[9][10]

To save the white protagonist, however, he would do anything, including sacrificing himself, as Sidney Poitier does in The Defiant Ones, the prototypical Magical Negro movie.[3]