Magical Negro Quotes

It was always somebody’s turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.

I needed to see more from my movies than the extremely tragic black woman, or the magic helpless Negro, or the many black men in dresses.

It is possible that in the dark slumbering of their unconscious, the White imagines that the only remedy for fear is death.

White folks' belief that Negroes were magically gifted struck her as the most absurd form of superstition. Sorcery was in the Bible, which meant it was real, but to Momma it was self-evident that like every other kind of power it would be concentrated in the hands of the mighty.

I needed to see more from my movies than the extremely tragic black woman, or the magic helpless Negro, or the many black men in dresses. You

When I wake up I never think I will be told to be ashamed I'm not ashamed No one tells me I'm beautiful

I feel most colored when I am the punchline. When I am the trigger.

El pesado ropón negro que llevaba desde hacía años había desaparecido; tenía ahora un vestido de seda color turquesa, brillante y delicado como el cielo del atardecer, acampanado en las caderas. Y la falda estaba toda bordada con finos hilos de plata, perlas y gemas de cristal, y relucía levemente como la lluvia de abril

What the fuck is that?" one of the cops yells. "I'm the magic Negro from all your worst nightmares," Cyrus laughs. "Now scatter!" He swirls his arms like he's gonna shoot a fireball at them and they take off, tearing through the ranks of NYCOD agents and disappearing around the corner. "I like this dude," Riley whispers. Cyrus

And what's a Magic Negro, you ask? The black man who is eternally wise and kind. He never reacts under great suffering, never gets angry, is never threatening. He always forgives all kinds of racist shit. He teaches the white person how to break down the sad but understandable prejudice in his heart. You see this man in many films. And Obama is straight from central casting.

Solutions to the complex plight of the Negro will not be easy. This does not signify that they are impossible. Recognizing these complexities as challenges rather than as obstacles, we will make progress if we freely admit that we have no magic. We will make progress if we accept the fact that four hundred years of sinning cannot be canceled out in four minutes of atonement. Neither can we allow the guilty to tailor their atonement in such a manner as to visit another four seconds of deliberate hurt upon the victim.

She opened the door and we found ourselves in underground vaults, beyond which was what looked like a silver lake, but was actually a lake of quicksilver. The princess clapped her hands, and a boat propelled by a yellow dwarf appeared. We stepped into the boat, and I saw that the dwarf’s face was of gold, with diamond eyes and a coral mouth. In other words it was an automaton who rowed through the quicksilver with his little oars and skilfully made the boat skim along. This novel pilot took us to the foot of a rock which opened up to allow us to pass into another chamber, in which there was the amazing spectacle of countless other automata: peacocks spreading enamel tails which were studded with jewels, parrots with emeralds for plumage flying above our heads, negroes made of ebony proffering golden platters laden with ruby cherries and sapphire grapes. There were numerous other astonishing objects in these magical vaults which stretched further than the eye could see.

In 1965, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that Black communities were caught in a tangle of pathology because our communities had a disproportionate number of female-led households, his conclusions had both affective and social dimensions. His 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” offered social and political recommendations focused on ways to help Black men become breadwinners again, so they could assume their “rightful” place at the head of Black families. But the affective goal of his infamous Moynihan Report was to shame Black women for the very mundane magic involved in our making a way out of no way. That shame persists well into the twenty-first century, when more than 70 percent of Black households are female-led. Black women have proportionally higher rates of abortion than any other group. There is no shame in having an abortion. I consider the right to choose the conditions under which one becomes a parent to be one of the most important social values. But I believe that decades of discourse about poor Black women and unwed Black mothers being “welfare queens,” who unfairly take more from the system than they put in, has shamed many Black women into not bearing children that they otherwise might consider having. The idea that only middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist and patriarchal.

In La Tête d’Obsidienne André Malraux relates a conversation that he had with Picasso in 1937, at the time he was painting “Guernica.” Picasso said, “People are always talking about the influence of the blacks on me. What can one say? We all of us liked those fetishes. Van Gogh said, ‘We all of us had Japanese art in common.’ In our day it was the Negroes. Their forms did not influence me any more than they influenced Matisse. Or Derain. But as far as Matisse and Derain were concerned, the Negro masks were just so many other carvings, the same as the rest of sculpture. When Matisse showed me his first Negro head he talked about Egyptian art. “When I went to the Trocadéro, it was revolting. Like a flea-market. The smell. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out. I didn’t go: I stayed. It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me, right? “Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren’t the Egyptians or Chaldees? We hadn’t understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors—that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits. I kept on staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me—I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing … Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way?

I honestly don't know what came first- a love of reading the newspapers, or wanting to be Super Negro, the magical special black person who has all the knowledge and is never caught out there looking ignorant.

The Magical Negro rested his red cane on his shoulder and leisurely strolled into the forest to see if he could find him some hobbits, castles, dragons, princesses, and all that other shit.

By summer’s end, there were more black than white communists in Birmingham, a situation that infuriated Magic City officials. Everyone knew that the Reds practiced social and racial equality in their ranks, and Hiram Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, writing in his Kourier newsletter, maintained that they were “dangling before the ignorant lustful and brutish negroes . . . a tempting bait . . . that negro men should take white women and live with them, declaring this is their God-given right under a communist regime.” Several Birmingham Klansmen became so incensed after reading Evans’s editorial that they burned Tom Johnson in effigy.13

If you think about how many magical Negro, Native American, or wise Asian mentor tropes you’ve watched in movies over the years, it’s easy to understand why so many white folks have been brainwashed into believing that POC exist to support their growth and evolution. The utter failure to comprehend that gaining respect and validation from white folks is not a ubiquitous goal for folks of color is exhausting.

I’ve always yearned to be a black man, to have a black man’s soul, a black man's laughter. You know why? Because I thought you were diflFerent from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something difiFerent on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. encouragement and signs of gratitude or recognition have been very few, if any, along my road. If humanity can be compared to a tribe, then you may say I’m completely de-tribalized. You love Negroes out of sheer misanthropy, because you think they aren’t really men. in the end all human faces look alike with nothing bright or hopeful around me, except those distant stars— and even there, let’s be frank: it’s only their distance that gives them that purity and beauty ideals don't die— obliged to live on shit sometimes, but don’t die! the company a great cause always keeps: men of good will and those who exploit them your skin, you know, is worth no more than the elephants’ hide. In Gennany, at Belsen, during the war, it seems we used to make lampshades out of human skin— for your information. And don’t forget, Monsieur Saint- Denis, that we Germans have always been forerunners in everything ‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ‘have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.’ The number of animals who lived in cruel suffering, sometimes for years, with bullets in their bodies, wounds growing deeper and deeper, gangrenous and swarming with ticks and flies, could not be estimated to change species, to come over to the elephants and live in the wilds among honest animals Always cheerful, with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured. No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men’s hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves. by ‘defending the splendors of nature . . .’ He meant liberty.” Islam calls that ’the roots of heaven.’ and to the Mexican Indians it is of life’— the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. A need for protection and company, from which obstinate people like Morel try to escape by means of petitions, fighting committees, by trying to take the protection of species in their own hands. Our needs- for justice, for freedom and dignity— are roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ...” . . . And that girl sitting there in front of him with her legs crossed, with her nylon stockings and cigarette and that silent gaze, in which could be read that stubborn need, not so different from what Morel had seen in the eyes of the stray dogs at the pound. but not even all that was comic and childish about him could deprive him of the dignity conferred upon him by his love for his Maker. that human mass whose physical strength was nothing compared to the faith and spirit that dwelt in him. Three quarters of the Oul6 traditions and magic rites had to do with war or hunting while it's easy to suppress a magic tradition it's difficult to fill up the strange voids which it leaves in what you call the primitive psychology and what I call the human soul The roots of heaven are forever planted in their hearts, yet of heaven itself they seem to know nothing but the gripping roots It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always

The Magical Negro is one of several “positive” Black stereotypes born out of the growing expectation that there should be SOME Black character included in a film.

Like the Magical Negro, the Sacrificial Negro is a “positive” stereotype that blossomed in modern cinema but has roots in age-old racist archetypes.

We lived up to now in a solid universe whose generations had deposited stratifications, one after the other. All was clear: the father was the father; the law was the law; the foreigner was the foreigner. One had the right to say that the law was hard, but it was the law. Today these sure bases of political life are anathema: for these truths constitute the program of a racist party condemned at the court of humanity. In exchange, the foreigner recommends to us a universe according to his dreams. There are no more borders, there are no more cities. From one end to the other of the continent the laws are the same, and also the passports, and also the judges, and also the currencies. Only one police force and only one brain: the senator from Milwaukee inspects and decides. In return for which, trade is free; at last trade is free. We plant some carrots which by chance never sell well, and we buy some hoeing machines which always happen to be very expensive. And we are free to protest, free, infinitely free to write, to vote, to speak in public, provided that we never take measures which can change all that. We are free to get upset and to fight in a universe of wadding. One does not know very well where our freedom ends, where our nationality ends, one does not know very well where what is permitted ends. It is an elastic universe. One does not know any more where one’s feet are set; one does not even know any more if one has feet; one feels very light, as if one’s body had been lost. But for those who grant us this simple ablation what infinite rewards, what a multitude of tips! This universe which they polish up and try to make look good to us is similar to some palace in Atlantis. There are everywhere small glasswares, columns of false marble, inscriptions, magic fruits. By entering this palace you abdicate your power, in exchange you have the right to touch the golden apples and to read the inscriptions. You are nothing any more; you do not feel any more the weight of your body; you have ceased being a man: you are one of the faithful of the religion of Humanity. At the bottom of the sanctuary there sits a Negro god. You have all the rights, except to speak evil of the god.

One was a full-blooded Negro, the other mixed, with pale skin, thick lips and crinkly hair.

heavily. Like all American Negroes she had desired to be white when she was young and before she entered business for herself and became a person of consequence in the community. Now she had lived long enough to have no illusions about the magic of a white skin. She liked her business and she liked her social position in Harlem. As a white woman she would have to start all over again, and she wasn’t so sure of herself. Here at least she was somebody. In the great Caucasian world she would be just another white woman,

You require me,” Atticus said. “To be your magic Negro?

Sometimes I go to the sink for water and I come back with a jar full of wine. Every second I breathe, I forgive.

If people believe the government is giving them AIDS and blowing up levees, and that white-owned companies are trying to sterilize them, they would be lacking in normal human emotions if they did not—to put it bluntly—hate the people they believed responsible. Indeed, vigorous expressions of hatred go back to at least the time of W.E.B. Du Bois, who once wrote, “It takes extraordinary training, gift and opportunity to make the average white man anything but an overbearing hog, but the most ordinary Negro is an instinctive gentleman.” On another occasion he expressed himself in verse: 'I hate them, Oh! I hate them well, I hate them, Christ! As I hate hell! If I were God, I’d sound their knell This day!' Such sentiments are still common. Amiri Baraka, originally known as LeRoi Jones, is one of America’s most famous and well-regarded black poets, but his work is brimming with anti-white vitriol. These lines are from “Black Dada Nihilismus:” 'Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.' Here are more of his lines: 'You cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open up if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick up!' In “Leroy” he wrote: “When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.” When he was asked by a white woman what white people could do to help the race problem, he replied, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.” In July, 2002, Mr. Baraka was appointed poet laureate of New Jersey. The celebrated black author James Baldwin once said: “[T]here is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, . . . simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low.” Toni Morrison is a highly-regarded black author who has won the Nobel Prize. “With very few exceptions,” she has written, “I feel that White people will betray me; that in the final analysis they’ll give me up.” Author Randall Robinson concluded after years of activism that “in the autumn of my life, I am left regarding white people, before knowing them individually, with irreducible mistrust and dull dislike.” He wrote that it gave him pleasure when his dying father slapped a white nurse, telling her not “to put her white hands on him.” Leonard Jeffries is the chairman of the African-American studies department of the City College of New York and is famous for his hatred of whites. Once in answer to the question, “What kind of world do you want to leave to your children?” he replied, “A world in which there aren’t any white people.

A lack of serotonin. A lack of vulnerability. No chill. Nothing real. No need to have her back because she don’t have one.

If it seems like I desire you, you’re right. I want my whole mouth around your safety. I want to be buried side by side.

Of course, the feedback loop of Sambo and Panther fables is inescapable only if the Negro concedes to internalize the mythology of the White (and as such, the imagination of the White, and as such, the latent desire for the Negro’s own demolition) as Standard. It is therefore in the Negro’s best interest to learn the language and rhetoric of the White and use the fluency to their advantage in matters of not only self-preservation, but also self-recognition.

Regular Black Regular Black Nigger I Nigger I Black​We till soil​We murdered for capital​We ride around shining in our own wake​We even make chains look good