Magical Negro

[2] The old-fashioned word "Negro" is used to imply that a "magical black character" who devotes himself to selflessly helping whites is a throwback to racist stereotypes such as the "Sambo" or "noble savage".

[2] The term was popularized in 2001 by film director Spike Lee during a lecture tour of college campuses, in which he expressed his dismay that Hollywood continued to employ this premise.

[6] The character will also do almost anything, including sacrificing themselves to save the white protagonist, as exemplified in The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier plays the prototypical Magical Negro.

[17]In 2001, Spike Lee used the term in a series of talks on college campuses to criticize the stereotypical, unreal roles created for black men in films that were recent at that time, naming The Family Man (2000), What Dreams May Come (1998), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), and The Green Mile (1999) as examples.

[3] Talking about the time and place in which Bagger Vance is set, he said: In a book published in 2004, writer Krin Gabbard claimed that the Oda Mae Brown character in the 1990 movie Ghost, played by Whoopi Goldberg, was an example of a Magical Negress.

[16]: 154–155 In 2012, writer Kia Miakka Natisse discussed actor Morgan Freeman playing parts conforming to the Magical Negro form, such as "a doctor who creates a prosthetic tail for a dolphin (in Dolphin Tale), and an ailing CIA mentor (in Red) – in both roles he reprises the Magical Negro type, coming to save the day for his imperiled white counterparts.

[citation needed][19] The 2019 indie film Cold Brook, written and directed by William Fichtner, included a Magical Negro named Gil Le Doux, played by Harold Perrineau.

[27][28] Shortly after that Paul Shanklin recorded a song about Barack the Magic Negro set to that same tune, which Limbaugh played numerous times throughout the 2008 presidential election season.

[32][33] In May 2015, theater and cultural critic Frank Rich, looking back at the coincidence of the 2015 Baltimore protests with the annual White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington, DC, wrote: "What made this particular instance poignant was the presence in the ballroom of our first African-American president, the Magic Negro who was somehow expected to relieve a nation founded and built on slavery from the toxic burdens of centuries of history.