The Society of Wizardly White People?
How to offend people on all sides. The sad outcome of hyperfocusing on microaggressions
I had recently finished the three-hour Alternative Edition fan edit of David Lynch’s Dune…one of my all-time favorite movies, by the way…and I was looking to watch something piecemeal, to watch while I was taking a break or snacking.
With visions of Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Muad’Dib in my mind, glowing blue eyes and all, I needed something a little less…epic.1
The Society of Magical Negroes was streaming on Peacock, so…what the hell. I watched it in bits and pieces rather than in one sitting.
The Society of Magical Negroes may in fact be one of the most blatantly racist films to be presented in theaters in the past 50 years. It literally includes the following dialogue:
“What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”
“Sharks?”
“White people…when they feel uncomfortable. White people feeling uncomfortable precedes a lot of bad stuff for us. That's why we fight white discomfort every day, because the happier they are, the safer we are.”
This ugly monologue was only softened by the main protagonist interjecting/stammering, in his Ricky Gervais delivery, some counterpoint along the lines of, “you mean white people with sharks?” Which did make me laugh, to be honest.
So even the hero of our story seemed skeptical about the blanket pronouncement of the dangers of white people.
Now, I’ve been told by woke white people that you can’t be racist against white people. This is based on the new definition of racism that claims that only people in power can be racist…but define power?
The white 15-year-old girl who had her head slammed into the pavement by a black girl and now has brain damage wasn’t in power at the point of her attack. But is the horrifying video the full story? The family of the attacker claims she was bullied and was defending herself in response.
It’s entirely possible that the white girl had been racist towards the black girl. Or vice versa. We don’t know. Or maybe these were two high school girls who hated each other for another reason entirely.
But what this incident does show us is that much of the premise of The Society of Magical Negroes is faulty…it’s a fantasy alternative reality where the entire United States is stuck in the Southern Jim Crow era and a black man would be lynched for simply looking at a white girl the wrong way.
That doesn’t happen today. We live in a society where, when a black girl almost beats to death a white girl, the black girl will be tried in court…not automatically lynched.
Today we only have online lynch mobs. And the family of the black girl probably did get deluged with a ridiculous amount of death threats and racist stupidity by idiotic armchair racists. That’s not cool, but it’s not Jim Crow.
That said, activists will argue that that black girl won’t be tried fairly in court. This remains to be seen. I’m typing this on the day that Hunter Biden just got convicted of three felonies over gun usage. He’s the white son of the president of the United States. Will he avoid prison time? Is any lenient treatment due to being white or being Joe Biden’s son?
Let’s not forget that our vice president is a black woman.
But apparently The Society of Magical Negroes did. In that alternative reality, blacks must tiptoe around white people, who are ready to pounce and kill depending on how “uncomfortable” they are.
Our protagonist, Aren, a scrawny and pale young black “yarn artist,” is so beaten down by the idea of being black that he’s a spineless, depressed doormat of a human being who can’t stand up for himself.
And this in and of itself is where The Society of Magical Negroes fails miserably.
Aren is supposed to represent the modern young black man. But he does not. He represents an elite, privileged young liberal who went to the graphic design version of Ivy League, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), pronounced “rizzdy” in the movie. He also makes a point in the movie that one of his parents is white…why?
Aren’s insecurities are blamed on the expectations of white people, but I suspect they are just the insecurities of the writer and director of The Society of Magical Negroes - himself an elite, paler-skinned black male who is traveling in liberal elite circles and thus likely awash with the concepts of microaggressions vs. real danger.
To me (now, I’m saying this as a white woman, so what do I know?) it’s insulting to black men to put Aren out there as some sort of “Black Everyman.”
I know I’ll get grief for the “I’ve had black friends” line of argument, but, the reality is, I have had black male friends and they are about 180 degrees opposite of Aren in The Society of Magical Negroes - as in, confident, smart, funny, engaging, and (apparently) not afraid of white people.
I’m talking about both rich and poor black men. One who was a successful model living with the daughter of Texas oil wealth in the Hollywood Hills, taking us to clubs in his luxury Land Rover…and another from the hood who was street drag racing in a Honda CRX with the passenger seat torn out and a nitro pack, just like the Fast and Furious.
I partied a TON with my rich black friend. He wasn’t cringing in a room full of white people. He’d walk in there like he owned the place. It might have helped that he was tall and drop dead gorgeous. But this is partly my point - his experience of life was different from that of Aren, who couldn’t walk through a room of white people at an art gallery without shaking and cowering like a kicked puppy dog.
My Fast and Furious friend was in a punk rock band and dressed punk too with thick silver, not gold, chains. He was thrown in jail once for beating up a guy who insulted his girlfriend. He shrugged it off. From what he told me, that was what guys did in the hood. He was not afraid of white people. I’m certain of that.
I met him while walking my roommate’s pit bull. Yes, pit bull. The dog would walk me, really. This black guy in punk rock clothes passed me on the street, with the pit bull, gave me a big, friendly smile, and said something like, “Hey, how are you doing?” and that’s how we met. We ended up chatting and became good friends.
So, here was a black man who was not afraid of white people or pit bulls. Or white people with pit bulls.
One of the things that happened with The Society of Magical Negroes is that it actually did piss some black people off…with some saying it centered “whiteness” too much…and when confronted with the criticism, the actor who played Aren, Justice Smith, made it worse by claiming “Black people were triggered by seeing something that they weren’t ready to admit in themselves.”
Nice woke gaslighting there. So, basically, if a black person doesn’t admit that they are being nice and friendly to white people out of fear, then they are just triggered as opposed to…over it.
The projection of insecurities by privileged liberals (of any race) is not new…in this case, I think it does a great disservice to the real issues of poor, inner city blacks, the ones who can’t afford to go to schools like RISD and who grew up in violence.
Even the NPR review of the movie called it out for its ridiculous portrayal of Aren:
Second, it has no Black characters. To be clear, there are real Black performers playing these roles on screen. But one would think fully human, complexly written roles ought to exist in a movie where the goal is combatting multiple centuries' worth of one-dimensional representation. Here, they decidedly do not.
…
Those muddled conflations would be less jarring if Aren were written as anything other than a convenient vessel for showcasing a convoluted premise. We know nothing about him besides that he's a failed, self-loathing Rhode Island School of Design alum who's so spineless he'll awkwardly hold the door for a parade of oblivious exiting passersby before finally entering a coffee shop for himself. Before becoming a Magical Negro (I can't believe this is an actual sentence I'm writing), he has no community to speak of – no friends, no real job, and no family, except a white mom he offhandedly mentions. (This is somehow both very illuminating and not at all illuminating at the same time.) Where did he grow up? How can Aren afford to be a struggling artist with a decent apartment in Los Angeles in this economy? Has Aren ever spent any time with Black people? (Magical Negroes don't count.)
Exactly. Once again, it feels like the director is pushing his own insecurities vs. any realities.
And it’s interesting to me, at least, that in a movie about busting the “Magical Negro” stereotype, the main love interest is not a black woman. She’s apparently Eurasian, but I thought she was just plain vanilla white up until the end of the movie.
At any rate, let’s get to the movie itself. The first third was actually not bad and had some laugh out loud moments. I do think the satirizing of the “Magical Negro” trope was done well and quite funny. The magical parts were good. I was not offended by most of that, actually.
Where the movie went downhill is when Aren gets a job at a big tech company to help a white guy there. And then the romcom begins, and the humor stopped for the most part.
So much in this movie is unrealistic, and I’m not talking about the magic. For example, the idea that a graphic designer at a Facebook-like company would have any sort of real job or power, and that the company wouldn’t have hired an expensive ad/creative agency to do a major rebrand.
Or that people in Los Angeles have no cars and walk to bars after work.
Or that the woke white people in Los Angeles wouldn’t be fawning all over the up-and-coming black artist and his yarn sculptures.
Or that the white female manager at the Facebook-like company would tell the Eurasian female (Lizzie) that she can’t present her designs but the idiotic white male could. (I’ll note that the white guy in this movie is portrayed as a dumb-ass).
The “romance” between the lead Aren and Lizzie is terrible. They have no chemistry, and both play off each other with that same Ricky Gervais hesitancy that can be funny in certain contexts, but gets annoying here real fast.
The main thing they seem to bond over are some lame microaggressions by the dumb white guy. Lizzie feels she has to “apologize” for not standing up for Aren more in an awkward conversation regarding Dumb White Guy being on a design team for a failed facial recognition system that doesn’t recognize black faces.
They later have a conversation in the park where Aren confesses to Lizzie how amazed he was when he saw a “Wall Street bro” get mugged, and how surprised he was at the look on the white guy’s face…that somehow the white guy didn’t think this could happen to him, that he had an expectation of safety in the world, and that he almost looked as if the knife was being presented to him as a gift.
What utter bullshit! The writer of this movie actually thinks that white people expect to be safe all the time and we never fear for our lives? We’ve never had any trauma? Or been the victims of assault or violence? WTF?!
At any rate, Aren ends up blowing up at Dumb White Guy at the stupidest moment, in front of the boss during a livestream presentation, in a weird speech where he seems to believe that America doesn’t feel he should exist, and he has some revelation that his self-loathing is really all about white people!
OK…to the Arens of the world…as a white woman, let me tell you a secret: We’re too fucked up with our own stuff to be thinking so much about you all the time.
If you bump into a white person and they look grumpy, it likely has nothing to do with your skin color. They are probably tired, upset at their wife cheating on them, or maybe they are trying to stop smoking.
The problem with the mindset of Aren - or rather, the director of the movie - is that he’s so focused on what he thinks white people are thinking about him based on his race that he’s fucking himself up in the process.
Here’s a hint, Aren: Stop worrying about what white people think about you.
This entire movie is the end result of years of programming over microaggressions and media hype over incidents such as George Floyd. What happened to Floyd was tragic but the media never mentions that a black cop also had his knee on Floyd’s back. Immediately, before any trial, we were told that Floyd was a victim of white racism. Never mind the Asian cop directing people at the scene either. Just one white cop at fault when four were present and two were men of color.
The end result is that we have Gen Z kids filled with fear and loathing. Good job, media and academia.
Now…the thing is, I think they could have done a much better job with this movie if they had either gone full dark comedy with it and just made it really extreme and crazy with the original premise (but no rom-com) OR made it a mainstream film that tries to bring people together by showing the false assumptions of the Arens of the world.
I’d like to see a version of The Society of Magical Negroes that had competing societies. As in, the Society of Wizardly White People or the Amazing Ninja Kung-Fu Asians. Or how about the House of Hermetic Hispanic Heroes? Like, go all out and make it silly.
What a waste of an idea.
Meanwhile, if you want to watch a much better film that handles racial and class disparities in a far better way, may I recommend to you the classic Trading Places with Eddie Murphy:
The Dune Alternative Edition has been upscaled to 4K. It is still rough in spots due to the insertion of previously deleted scenes. While I like seeing the new scenes, in some ways the theatrical version is probably better for a newbie as it feels a bit faster-paced…but this really depends on your interest in sci-fi worlds and backstory.
The only-people-in-power definition of racism is an invalid reimagination of the meaning of the word, which disregards the essence of racism, and is deployed as an overt attempt to shift power to POC.
Trading Places is better in virtually every way. Really Eddie Murphy at his best -- right up there with Coming to America.