Hoodoo Economics: White Men's Work and Black Men's Magic in Contemporary American Film

In a November 2000 editorial in Time entitled "That Old Black Magic," columnist Christopher John Farley notes that a spate of recent US films, including The Legend of Bagger Vance (dir. Robert Redford, 2000), What Dreams May Come (dir. Vincent Ward, 1998), Family Man (dir. Brett Ratner, 2000), and The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont, 1999), have portrayed African Americans as magical figures. Nicknaming such figures Magical African American Friends (MAAFs), he reasons that blacks are represented in these terms out of a fundamental ignorance of African American life and culture. "MAAFs exist," he suggests, "because most Hollywood screenwriters don't know much about black people other than what they hear on records by white hip-hop star Eminem. So instead of getting life histories or love interests, black characters get magical powers." ¹ In this essay I would like to think further about the association of blackness with magic in contemporary mainstream films—a phenomenon which, as Farley's article suggests, has been pronounced enough to receive attention in the popular press. Specifically, I'd like to explore how black men are associated with supernatural forces and to suggest that this phenomenon cannot be separated from certain contemporary crises surrounding white masculinity. ²

An important similarity among most of the films of what we can call the MAAF genre is that the black males are not simply magical but that their magic is ostensibly directed toward helping and enlightening a white male character. While not concerning himself with gender issues, Anthony Appiah has begun to explore such screen depictions of black beneficence toward whites in his analysis of "the Saint as a black movie type." ³ Appiah offers several possible explanations for why saintly black figures, from Danny Glover's Simon in Grand Canyon (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, US, 1991) to the powerful psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost (dir. Jerry Zucker, US, 1990), are conceived by what he self-consciously terms "'white' Hollywood." ⁴ He suggests that perhaps black characters must be assigned saintlike goodness to counteract the racism white audiences automatically direct toward a black character on screen. That is, for white audiences, a saintly black character is the moral equivalent of a "normal" white character. Or, he speculates further, perhaps "the Saint draw[s] on the tradition of the superior virtue of the oppressed":

Is there, in fact, somewhere in the Saint's background a theodicy that draws on the Christian notion that suffering is ennobling? So that the black person who represents undeserved suffering in the American imagination can also, therefore, represent moral nobility? Does the Saint exist to address the guilt of white audiences, afraid that black people are angry at them, wanting to be forgiven, seeking a black person who is not only admirable and lovable, but who loves white people back? Or is it simply that Hollywood has decided, after decades of lobbying by the NAACP's Hollywood chapter that, outside crime movies, blacks had better project good images, characters who can win the NAACP's "image awards"? (83)

Appiah raises important questions here, but he defers answers, choosing instead to explore whether the questions themselves matter; the remainder of his essay focuses on whether films have, in fact, any significant impact on public consciousness.

Rather than focusing on whether, ultimately, such films are racist or not, and whether, in turn, that makes their audiences racist, I would like to think about how these films reflect contemporary upheavals at the nexus of masculinity and economics. What neither Farley nor Appiah address is the degree to which many of the films made in the last decade and a half featuring magical black men specifically concern white men whose lives as workers in some way require revision. Indeed, one of the "realistic" elements of the films incorporating black magical men is their attention to the work...