And you can’t address any of those, without discussing how they are promoted, which is primarily via popular culture…
Norman Mailer has entered the chat…
And also, these guys…
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The thing I’m picking apart.
And those white hipster were dressed as servants?
Nowhere in this am I denying than other appropriation exists or isn’t a factor. Nor that stereotypes exist and are harmful. Nor that these things are tied together.
But how often do you see “these guys” as part of a Magical Negro narrative in films?
And you’ve never seen Last of the Mohicans? Or any given martial arts movie where the white person learns to be better at martials than the people who invented it?
Are you saying that there is some clean line between Black Americans that were the primary servant class and Black American working class culture?
Your comment was not clear that you were talking about films and the like. And YES, that’s a thing, but so is tropes about Black people teaching white people to be “better” than them… 
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No I’m saying that in regards to the specifics within that. Which things get appropriated in which ways and by whom matters.
There’s meaning in it.
Trying to tease that out is not denying it’s a factor. It’s important. It’s something I enjoy. And it was something I was specifically educated in.
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What the fuck does that even mean?
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It’s the core dynamic in a particular set of tropes.
Like white man gets adopted by Indians and learns all the Indian things, then saves the day.
Or like I’ve said multiple times when White Ninja out Kung-Fus all of East Asia.
Those and similar tropes are pretty much welded to mystical tropes around the same cultures.
Your stereotype teaches a white protagonist the culture, and white protagonist then surpasses the teacher and community in that culture.
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I believe you’re referring to what TVTropes calls “Mighty Whitey.” While such “white savior” tropes are fairly common in film and literature, I’m not sure how that’s relevant to either Stephen King or the concept of the “magical Negro.”
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White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in “Magical Negro” Films
has a list of films to avoid, but iit’s only updated through 2009.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Racism is a blight that affects a lot of BBSers in real-life. I would ask that people not consider the concept of racism as an intellectual exercise as a result. The trope being discussed here (and the many other similar tropes that are certainly on-topic in the discussion overall) are important to understand because they help bring systemic racism to light, and that makes this topic an important one! But be respectful to your fellow mutants in the realization that while the effects of the trope, its origins and prevalence with certain authors may be up for debate, the effects of racism overall are not.
Thanks.
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False equivalencies are what some folks resort to when the topic at hand is too awkward and uncomfortable for them to handle… or when they want to pontificate as if they are some kind of 'all knowing experts" based upon their personal ‘research’ over the actual lived experiences of POC.
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I guess I always just assumed Stephen King was the canonical place to point to for touchstones that have broad culture reach to give examples of the magical negro phenomenon…
I’ve always took his preference for this trope as a way of boomers of a certain political leaning using stuff like this as their way of trying to make amends for things, as best they knew how, but it ended up being awkward as far as outcomes?
But if a white writer does that, don’t they run a big risk of writing what amount to white characters, who they then merely attach an ethnoracial label to?
Being something other than white usually is a significant factor in the life of someone who’s not white. I don’t think white writers are likely to create credible characters who are POC if they ignore that fact.
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In the hands of an unskilled writer, perhaps, but I am a firm believer that writers do not and should not know characters until they’ve written them out a bit. Give them mannerisms, ways of thinking, emotional hangups and then work on the backstory. A writer will go through multiple drafts and can always go in and add or subtract things later. If a character becomes a POC in the course of writing, the writer can adjust for that.
I think that it may just be a better process than starting with, “Ok, he’s Asian. Where do I go from there?” It’s harder for stereotypes to take over if you get to know the character a bit beforehand.
Characters do not spring from the author’s mind fully formed in an instant. They often start out as amorphous ideas, and I think that authors should roll with that a bit before deciding a character’s life story.
This depends on whether you think someone’s emotional core and identity informs their external expressions or the reverse.
One understands the character, the other is
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Exactly. And that brings us to the big question: to what extent is a person’s emotional core and identity defined by their race? Not influenced by. Defined by.
If a white author starts out with a Black character, are all of that character’s traits then an outgrowth of that character’s Black identity? No. They cannot be; they can only be an outgrowth of the author’s understanding of Black identity. Once the author makes that decision on the race of a character, everything else about that character is through that lens of a white person envisioning a Black person. I think that characters would be more authentic if the author put that decision off until later in the character development process.
I think that’s the issue here. We are not talking about actual POC. We are talking about fictional POC written from the perspective of non-POC. The emotional core has to be there, but if the emotional core is defined by race, then in fiction it will invariable be swayed by the author’s own perceptions of race. Fortunately, an author can build an emotional core that is simply human and then add to that later.
