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Starring Morgan Freeman as the Genie!
The film opens with yet another voiceover narration by Morgan Freeman, extolling the saintly virtues of a white person who deserves our reverence.
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
—Saul Alinsky
In order to show the world that minority characters are not bad people, one will step forward to help a "normal" person, with their pure heart and Closer To Earth wisdom. They are from a minority that is discriminated against, physically or mentally disabled, or social outcasts (drifters, the homeless, ex-cons). They step (often clad in a clean, white suit) into the life of the central character (often white, American and racist) and, in some way, enrich the central character's life.
While this can work as a plea for tolerance, or simply An Aesop about not dismissing people just because they're different, it's all too easy to go too far and make them into an all-knowing Mary Sue or pseudo-narrator whose magical minority-powers save the day. It also tends to raise the question that if the Magical Negro (more commonly called the Magic Negro, and sometimes the Mystical 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 or even killed after he's fulfilled his purpose for the plot.
If the Magical Negro is from a society of Noble Savages, expect an Anvilicious Aesop about the failings of the society which protagonist comes from - which usually leads to the protagonist ' going native' and ending up better at everything than his Magical Negro mentor.
The reason the Magical Negro is problematic is because it is a moral and artistic shortcut, replacing a genuine moral message with a well-intentioned but patronizing homage to the special gifts of the meek.
Morgan Freeman is the ultimate Magical Negro actor. Referenced on The Daily Show when discussing Barack Obama's need to pick a running mate who won't just turn him into one. Though, Morgan does play one of the best gods ever.
See also Whoopi Epiphany Speech and Black Best Friend. For a similar trope about women, see Manic Pixie Dream Girl; the Magical Girlfriend may play a similar role for her love interest, but is not necessarily an example of this. For the gay version see Magical Queer. The disabled version of this is Inspirationally Disadvantaged or Disability Superpower. When this is not specific to race or gender the character is a Sidekick Ex Machina. Similar in vein to the Magical Native American, though that trope tends to be more explicitly magical.
NOTE ON WRITING EXAMPLES FOR THIS PAGE: Do not add an entry simply because there is a mentor or magical character who belongs to a minority. Do not assume every such character is the result of Positive Discrimination. Good entries for this trope either embody a Discredited Trope or seem adequately justified by the context of the story.
Note that even The Other Wiki has an entry about the Magical Negro.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Dragon Ball: Adjutant Black qualifies; an impressive and competent (and black) soldier who has devoted himself entirely to being the personal assistant of the bumbling and petty (and white) commander of the Red Ribbon Army, General Red. Later becomes a subversion when Black's infinite patience runs out, and he rebels and takes over.
Comic Books
- In the recent story "Batman R.I.P.", Bruce Wayne is found lost on the street with no memory of who he is, when he comes across a black homeless man named Honor Jackson. Honor helps Bruce start his path to recovery, but then disappears and is revealed to have already been dead. Honor's a bit of a subversion of this trope though, looking for his own personal redemption and saying that he'd never done anything he could be proud of, but was now happy to save one man's life.
- Yinsen from Iron Man's origin, who exists only to be very wise and honorable and then die so Iron Man can get motivated to kick evil ass, is an Asian version of this.
Film
- Harlan in Adam.
- Lamont in American History X.
- How about the Bogo-Matassalai from Arthur and the Invisibles?
- Gloria in Because of Winn-Dixie is a {{Token Minority Twoferthreefer:}} blind, black, and a dry alcoholic.
- Bulworth: The homeless man played by Amiri Baraka, who tells Bulworth "You've got to be a spirit, not a ghost," and then shows up again at the end of the film as what could be interpreted as an angelic presence, after Bulworth has been shot and killed to repeat his advice.
- Given the entire content of the Bulworth film and its themes on race, I think there is little chance that this is should be filed under magic negro. It fits the story perfectly.
- The Defiant Ones: Sydney
- Dogma: Rufus is somewhat of a parody. And according to Rufus, Jesus is the Ur Example. Taking in consideration the Brazilian movie O Auto da Compadecida, it could be taken literally.
- The Family Man: Cash
- Inverted in Finding Forrester, when Sean Connery plays a mysterious white man with incredible writing ability that helps a clueless inner city youth (black) become a famous writer and the man now, dog.
- Subverted, somewhat with Whoopi Goldberg's character in Ghost. She starts out as a fraud, and when she discovers her supposed Psychic Powers are real, she panics and refuses to help the main character. She only agrees to help after the main character annoys her beyond endurance.
- Possibly reversed in Gran Torino, where a cranky, foul-mouthed, casually racist old white guy helps a young Hmong boy find his way in America and makes a Heroic Sacrifice for him.
- Moses the clock worker in The Hudsucker Proxy. He provides sagely narration in a stereotypical patois, is satisfied coaxing the protagonist to success, and apparently has the power to stop time by obstructing the gears of the Hudsucker Building's clock. He's a subversion of the trope by being, literally and blatantly, a Magic Negro.
- The Legend Of Bagger Vance: Bagger Vance; notably, the film is very loosely based on the Bhagahvad-Gita, with Vance in the role of Krishna, so it's implied that Bagger Vance is actually God. Admittedly, this is a fairly appropriate translation of the original story. The easiest way to get Western audiences to understand the extreme social distance between the prince Arjuna and his charioteer is to portray "R. Junnah" as white and "Bagger Vance" as black in the Jim Crow South.
- In the second Pirates Of The Caribbean film, there were accusations of the black voodoo lady Tia Dalma being a Magical Negro. Given Disney's tendency towards Unfortunate Implications this isn't really surprising. However, the third film revealed Tia Dalma to actually be the sea goddess Calypso who is searching for a way to be freed from her mortal body. Which really is quite similar, but also works in that she's not necessarily on anyone's side but her own.
- Considering how much Unfortunate Implications (going on blatant racism) the second film contains, it seems strange that people even noticed that. 'Twas truly a drop in th'ocean.
- Radio, the 2003 film
- The Oracle in The Matrix
- Don't forget Morpheus, the all knowing magic teacher who will never give up on his quest to find the One. The team traitor is of course white, as are the enemy agents.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? kicked off with a Magical Negro version of Teiresias from Homer's Odyssey. A bit of a parody.
- A historical/film example which seems to play with or subvert the trope is the movie Something the Lord Made. It tells the story of a white surgeon (Alan Rickman) aided in his cardiac research by a black assistant (Mos Def) who is clearly the greater genius of the two. However, against type, the black assistant is not shown as being happy having another take credit for his work, but realizes this is the only way for him to do what he is interested in rather than being a janitor. There is also an implication that despite his goodness and supposed liberalism, the white doctor was essentially a plagiarist taking advantage of the racist system. Based on the true story of Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock, whose relationship the Wikipedia summarises as "complicated and contradictory".
- Uncle Remus from Song Of The South epitomizes this trope, to no discredit to the story itself.
- Waiting... had Bishop, a ridiculously blatant execution of this trope. Seriously, he existed only to give complex advice to everyone's social and psychological problems, and did so with a calm, deep-voiced, wise demeanor.
- Morgan Freeman uses this persona for his role in Wanted. Actually a subversion, since he's manipulating the Fraternity for profit, and all his talk about "destiny" and "duty" turns out to be a smokescrean. And again in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in which he plays the wise Moor Azeem, apparently gifted with the ability to solve any problem which calls for brains over brawn. Historically speaking, the time of Richard I was at least half a century after the Muslim world began to backslide into fundamentalism from its scientific golden age, but it's possible Azeem left his homeland because of fundamentalism believing such things as math being a tool of the devil. In any case, while some people (such as the religious Friar Tuck) think he's a literal Magical Negro ("You are truly a wizard!"), he's actually just versed in science. (It's almost like some '80s and '90s movies with their Technological Asians.)
- Morgan Freeman in the Bruce/Evan Almighty films, where the main character is a selfish white guy who needs Magical Negro assistance to find wisdom.
- Djimon Hounsou also seems to be playing this sort of role A LOT since his role as Maximus' friend in Gladiator.
- Not Another Teen Movie has a parody of a Magical Negro in the "Wise Janitor"...played by Mr. T.
- In M Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable: Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson), the black and physically-handicapped mentor to Bruce Willis' is one of these. Until the ending when it's brutally subverted. He is revealed to be an Evil Genius who has been murdering and destroying in the hope of finding a "True Superhero," and any help he gives Bruce is purely manipulative. All he wanted to do is find his opposite, because it meant there was a reason for someone like him to exist.
- An entire army of black people turn up to liberate the white protagonist's girlfriend in 10000 BC. Granted, they were actually interested in liberating their own people from slavery, too, but at the end, the leader of these guys almost sacrifices his entire people to slavery, in order to show us their moral superiority and shame the white audience.
- Will Smith seems to often play roles where he is not literally magical but otherwise fulfills the role of Magic Negro, seeming to exist to be superior to non-minority characters, such as in Hitch, where he plays the smooth date doctor to bumbling white guys although he realizes he needs a little help himself, when using his own smooth moves backfires.
- Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Though his power is more knowledge of surviving in prison and getting things.
- The handicapped (black) golf instructor/mentor whose hand got eaten by a crocodile in some Adam Sandler flick.
Literature
- Stephen King seems to have issues on this subject; many of his writings and their film adaptations include examples of this trope. To be fair to King, he does acknowledge his tendency to write characters such as Dick Hallorann and Mother Abigail as superblack heroes (his words) and says they are products of his white liberal guilt.
- The Green Mile: John Coffey, the gentle black man who calmly dies so as not to cause a fuss while using his powers to help those who guarded his cell. There is a Christ-metaphor at work there, subtly (?) showing the white audience how their structural racism killed Coffey.
- The Shining: Dick Hallorann, elderly black man with psychic powers.
- The Stand: Mother Abagail, elderly and black; Nick Andros, deaf-mute; Tom Cullen, mentally disabled. Abagail is arguably an aversion, since she's pretty much the single most powerful person in Boulder. Also averted in that we spend quite a lot of time inside Mother Abigail's head, and her self-doubt complicates the situation for the heroes in the second act. But other than that, yeah.
- Dreamcatcher: Dudditz, saintly brain-damaged kid.
- Magic, mentally disabled guys are arguably a literal trope in themselves with Stephen King. They seem to have special immunity to dark magic and what-not.
- The Talisman (and to a lesser extent the sequel Black House): Young, white hero Jack Sawyer is guided along his way by aging blues-man Lester "Speedy" Parker and his Territories twinner, Parkus. Also Wolf, the somewhat slow werewolf in The Talisman.
- The Dark Tower: Sheemie Ruiz, the slightly retarded psychic and teleporter.
- But he manages to mostly avoid doing it in It, with Mike Hanlon, who, while sage-like, is a very active participant in the big battles and doesn't even die!
- In Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, Moon Man and The Lady are typical Magical Negroes.
- Uncle Tom, from Uncle Toms Cabin, who refused to escape from being sold to protect two other slaves (Eliza and her son Harry) who did escape — and served as a moral inspiration to his first new masters, the St. Clare family, before his final martyrdom at the hands of Simon Legree. And even then, he managed to convert Kimo and Sambo, the ones who actually beat him to death per Legree's orders. (This reflects, perhaps unintentionally, some early Christian martyr stories, where those doing the killing subsequently convert precisely because of it.) The trope is more evident in the stage adaptations of the original book, which suffered severe Adaptation Decay; the original Tom was intended as more of a Christ figure.
- The Biblical tale of the Good Samaritan, Samaritans being a perennial subject of racism in the holy land around that time, a detail which is really important to the message of the story but often forgotten. You know what that means.
- This...only sort of fits the trope. Samaritans were viewed as immoral people by the Jews of the time because, though they shared common spiritual roots, they differed on certain points that the Jews considered very important (mostly on where ritual offerings were to be made). It wasn't so much a case of Positive Discrimination as it was another repetition of one of the overarching themes of Jesus's teachings: it's selfless compassion and mercy rather than superficial, ritualistic displays of piety that really count.
- Brom's The Plucker, despite being beautifully written and illustrated, unfortunately casts the character Mabelle as a blatant Magical Negro: she uses forbidden magic to help the white family, then dies unpleasantly and returns as a ghost to tell the little boy how to dispose of the Big Bad's remains.
- The title character in Bernard Malamud's short story The Angel Levine is an early (and very blatant) example.
- The Cay features an old black man who rescues a racist white boy who had become blinded when their ship sinks. The two live together in a tropical island and the black man lives long enough to make the boy a better person before dying in a hurricane. The book won a number of awards before suffering a backlash due to accusations of racism. Nonetheless it remains a classic children's/young adult book.
- Jim from Huckleberry Finn is a nice subversion. While he is Black, and into magic, it doesn't Flanderize him and certainly isn't portrayed typically. Bonus points for averting *Hollywood Voodoo.
- Hassan, from The Kite Runner. Not black(he's Hazara), but hits the rest of the criteria so heavily to demand recognition.
Live Action TV
Theater
- Played oddly straight by the black playwright August Wilson, many of whose Century Cycle plays include characters of this nature as parts of all-or-nearly-all-black casts (Stool Pigeon in King Hedley II, Elder Barlow in Radio Golf, Aunt Ester in Gem of the Ocean and offstage in other plays).
Web Original
Western Animation
- This is one trope that The Simpsons did not subvert for the first time, though they did have fun with it. Lisa Simpson had her own personal Magical Negro in the form of Bleedin' Gums Murphy, who noted that she should should listen when people tell her to brush her teeth and that she sang the blues pretty good for someone with no actual problems.
- Bleeding Gums Murphy really was closer to a Mentor though.
- They finally did outright subvert this in the episode "Brawl in the Family", with the character Gabriel, an apparent Magical Negro (who Homer thinks is an angel) and social worker assigned to help the family with their dysfunction. He's also voiced by Delroy Lindo. Homer expressly compares him to the aforementioned Bagger Vance example. Gabriel, confronted by Homer's long lost Vegas wife, gives up on the family, telling Homer, "Your seed should be wiped from the Earth!"
- The Wrong Coast had one movie parody with the title Magical Black Men. Starring Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Don Cheadle and Lawrence Fishburne teaming up to solve the problems of white men in a moral crisis.
- Subverted and parodied by Toots in Clone High. Toots is a blind jazz clarinetist who tries to give sagely advice, and really, really fails.
- Subverted by Chef of South Park', whose advice usually amounts to him singing passionate soul songs about sex. That, or imparting information an 8-year-old really shouldn't know.
Stan: "Chef, how can I get a girl to like me?"
Chef: "Oh, that's easy! You just have to find the clitoris."
- And on one occasion where Chef could have given Stan useful information, he didn't.
Chef: "Hello there, children!"
Stan: "Chef, Chef! What would a priest wanna stick up my butt?"
Chef: "...G'bye!"
- The crows in Dumbo, a Talking Animal version of this trope.
- Inverted in Yvon of the Yukon; the title character, a ludicrously uncouth, unkempt, vulgar and crusty Frenchman becomes a "sagely" mentor to the thoroughly ordinary teenager Tommy, who happens to be Inuit.
- Somewhat parodied with Mashed Potato Johnson on Metalocalypse, in that he gives the boys advice on how to become successful blues musicians, when they're already the most popular musicians in history.
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