Obama, "magical 'igger"?

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 9:30 AM on March 22, 2007.

Guest post by novelist John Ridley; first appeared on Huffington Post.

My wife hates it when I use the word nigger.

Other people hate it, too.

I don't care about other people.

Love my wife.

From now on I will use the word 'igger. Mostly.

But that's not really what I'm writing about.

I'm writing about the bizarre spectacle of left-leaning blacks cannibalizing Barack Obama, which I had long thought had reached its apogee.

Silly me.

Whether blacks vote Obama or not - I don't yet know if I'll be tossing my vote his way - there oughta be a certain glee that comes from seeing a black man build on other's success and move toward a higher plain. Isn't that how we're supposed to function as blacks: each of us scaling the ladder, laying down a rung for those subsequent to us? But the self-haters don't see it that way. They keep stockpiling future weapons of idiocy to go after the guy.

Why, I don't know. The partisan hacks and far right attack poodles are in a prime position to do the work for them without being so obvious with their self-loathing.

But same as bounty hunters tracking freed men, the enablers of our race keep going after Obama.

Or, at least in a remix of an old song, they're now going after whites that'd dare support a black man.

Some guy writing for the LA Times - and, yeah, he's got a name but I'll be damned if I'm going to give him any ink - whipped up a piece that actually begins with some interesting insight:

... defining the "Magic Negro;" a postmodern liberal caricature in fiction and film. A nearly angelic black who just shows in a story for no other reason than to guide white people to a better place through his innate goodness.

It is an overused character - often played, as the piece's author notes, by such greats as "Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith" - who makes most ticket buying blacks want to puke. Show up, dispense a few yokle-isms, make whitey happy, assuage their liberal guilt, then get out of their suburb before sundown.

And I'm with the author to that point. It's really a smart piece. Then the cat F's it up by saying that Obama's nothing but a "Magical Negro" incarnate and any white that casts a ballot for him is basically tossing him a guilt-lined sympathy vote.

That's right, White America, if you even think of voting for Obama you're guilty, guilty, guilty! Not enlightened, or elevated or open-minded, or at the very least a prescient judge of the Dem field as it stands. YOU ARE GUILTY!

Mind you, you never hear that come November somebody might potentially be pulling the lever for HRC out of "Magical White Chick" guilt, or Bill Richardson because he's a "Magico Latino," or somebody going in for Mit Romney 'cause they never did anything nice for a Mormon. But if you're white and you're even thinking about, even considering voting black this early in the game there's only one explanation: somebody in your family owned slaves.

Now, the author of the piece says part of the irrefutable evidence that Obama's surfing a wave of white good will is that there's so little press to the negative about him. 'Cause, of course, for journos to report the facts and keep clear of the dirty laundry is as unthinkable as it is undesirable.

But even that notion is baseless. Hasn't the guy been keeping up with John Gibson and his one man Christain Crusade against the "infidel" Obama? How about the reportage of Obama buying stock in the companies of some contributors, and that shady land deal he did. And did you hear the guy SMOKES! Morgan Freeman played a pimp once, but smoke…?

Not much of that has stuck to Obama 'cause a) it's all more or less spurious in nature, and b) with the far right having trouble finding a candidate that won't screw everything that moves or bomb everything that isn't Christian and sitting on oil - the public doesn't care if it's Marlboro lights or Camel Wides for Mr. Obama.

The Times piece then gets pretty much mud stuck in some psycho babble about something or other that's got nothing to do with race or politics other than the fact that Obama the "Magic Negro" made a few unpaid parking tickets disappear prior to his announcing along with the notion of his smoking (BTW-he paid the tickets. Some trick).

As if that's some feat in the face of the philandering right and their supernatural ability to make their ilk see that it's Gay Marriage that's bad, not lots and lots of loose hetero sex…

But in the author's eyes there is no Obama there. Liberal whites love his Dr. John Wade Prentice act and that's about all he's got to offer. At some point I thought the title of the piece was going to shift from "Magical Black" to "Hocus Pocus . . ." and here's where the love of my wife comes in "'igger." Hocus Pocus Igger.

But I reserve that title not for Obama, but for all the other silly black rabbits out there who just don't dig it: political tricks aren't for Obama.

Tagged as: obama, election08, blacks

John Ridley is a novelist and frequent commentator for PBS and NPR.