From “Magic Negro” to “Uppity Negro” – How the LA Times Continues to Struggle With the President’s Race

So… Who is the racist again?

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times attacked Gateway Pundit for reposting a picture of Michelle Obama as a brazen queen picking her next upscale vacation getaway.

They said the post was racist.

Today John Nolte at Big Journalism called out the LA Times for projecting their own racism on this blog, Gateway Pundit.

Christopher Knight writes for the “Culture Monster” a column over at ”The Incredibly Shrinking L.A. Times,” and guess what our progressive friend sees when he looks at this innocuous and obvious political cartoon of First Lady Michelle Obama. Believe it or not, Mr. Knight sees an “uppity Negro.” Those aren’t my words, those are his:

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an “uppity Negro[.]“

Who other than someone with their own disturbing prejudices would look at that obvious piece of political satire hitting the First lady up for her excessive and lavish vacationing and think “uppity Negro”?

Sadly, this is not the first time the LA Times has used racist terminology to describe the Obamas. In 2007 David Ehrenstein at the LA Times wrote a whole article describing Obama as the latest “magic negro” to hit the scene.

AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the “Magic Negro.”

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .

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.

As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that’s not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is “Magic.”

So maybe before the LA Times wants to suggest that Gateway Pundit is racist blog, they will take a look at their own paper first.

Related… Mean is not racist. idiots.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!