Anderson Cooper of CNN titles his recent post "RNC chair candidate sends out controversial Obama song."
Why is is controversial to make fun of a liberal black columnist calling Obama "The Magic Negro?" It absolutely begs to be made fun of.
It all started when Time's columnist David Ehrenstein wrote a piece titled "Obama the 'Magic Negro" back in March of '07. (You will notice that Anderson doesn't bother to link that column, which would have taken all of 10 seconds to find, to make it clear where the song came from). Paul Shanklin (known of his parody songs) then recorded a parody song as satire directed at the Times that played on Rush Limbaugh's show.
To this day there are still leftwing bloggers who use that as example of Rush being a racist, thinking that Rush himself made up or approved of a song calling Obama "the magic negro" himself. Apparently never listening to the song which mentions the LA Times in the chorus several times.
I would think that the column itself would be what is controversial, not the song making fun of it.
But, that's liberals for ya.
The LA Times column reads in part:
The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia.
He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.
Ehrenstein ends with this:
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
So, basically saying that Obama is non threatening, unlike most black men, without a past to be afraid of, he appears to help the white man say to himself that he can live with a black such as this.
Now that isn't controversial enough for Anderson to even link or mention that a liberal black wrote it, but the RNC chair sending out the song as the funny parody it is, is controversial.
Right.
