Talk:Magical Negro

Capitalization of "negro"

Please discuss this topic at Talk:List_of_magical_negro_archetypes_in_fiction#Capitalization_of_.22negro.22. Thanks! - SummerPhD (talk) 16:22, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Numinous negro?

No one, outside of very small circles, has heard of that term. Feels piggybacked to me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.77.116.105 (talk) 05:17, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

• Response to above comment, and serial deletion of link/mention to term "numinous Negro"

Piggybacked? OR? Please, if you would just read the linked article about "numinous Negro" you would plainly see that it clearly is the same idea simply expressed using a different term - and therefore deserves to be included in the content of this article. Here's a pertinent bit of the article in question

taken from http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/220766/numinous-negro/flashback

"The dictionary defines “numinous” as “of or pertaining to a numen,” which was a Roman term for “the presiding divinity . . . of a place.” “Numinous” also means “spiritually elevated.” Jungians and literary critics love the word, but normal theologians use it too. The Numinous Negro is a presiding divinity. The place he presides over is America, and contact with him elevates us spiritually.

You see him in the gooey prose of white liberals whenever a Negro appears (“Negro” was the accepted word when blacks first became Numinous). Dozens of examples could be culled from the work of the late Murray Kempton, though his humor operated as a brake on his piety. The work of Garry Wills, who has no humor at all, would yield thousands of examples. The Numinous Negro need not be a man. Toni Morrison and Oprah are Numinous Negroes (Ms. Morrison is a seer; Oprah is a sage). Marian Anderson was also Numinous.

Art and entertainment, always eager for shortcuts to characterization, make frequent use of the Numinous Negro. When we see a Negro in movies or television, we not only know he is Numinous (unless he is Thuggish- see below), we can judge the other (white) characters by how they treat him. The saintly Death Row hero of The Green Mile was so Numinous that even movie reviewers noticed the technique. Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption was more complex, though it had elements of numinosity. Some years ago, Freeman played Petruchio in a Central Park production of The Taming of the Shrew. There he was not Numinous at all, simply a figure of farce (and an excellent one). But so ingrained are our expectations that it took this spectator a moment to adjust."

So there you have it, okay? "References to literature and film" - just like in the Wikipedia article! - and "references to supernaturality" - i.e., "magical". Do you need it spelled out any further? This is not "WP:OR" or "piggybacked" or "off-topic" - it is relevant and pertinent. Claiming it is "a term no one outside of specific circles has heard of" as justification for deletion is an utterly meaningless argument! Is that why we read Wikipedia articles? To see things that we are already familiar with?

I will not engage in an edit war here - I am going to allow your own sensibility of what is clearly acceptable, to either guide you or punish you, and I will let you make the change yourself. Too bad if you are so misguided that you are incapable of seeing past your own failure of perception. "Piggybacked" "OR", indeed! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.70.70.249 (talk) 02:22, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

The term, "Magic Negro", was used by Paul Shanklin in a Rush Limbaugh (radio) Show parody, after a Los Angeles Times writer used the term for Barack Obama during the primaries of 2008. Today Rush Limbaugh reviews the term history and says, "So Wikipedia gets it right." Charles Edwin Shipp (talk) 17:01, 1 November 2011 (UTC)