"Barack the Magic Negro" distributed by RNC candidate

RNC candidate distributes controversial Obama song
By Reid Wilson
Posted: 12/26/08 12:10 PM [ET]

RNC candidate Chip Saltsman’s Christmas greeting to committee members includes a music CD with lyrics from a song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” first played on Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show.
Saltsman, a personal friend of conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, sent a 41-track CD along with a note to national committee members.

“I look forward to working together in the New Year,” Saltsman wrote. “Please enjoy the enclosed CD by my friend Paul Shanklin of the Rush Limbaugh Show.”

The CD, called “We Hate the USA,” lampoons liberals with such songs as “John Edwards’ Poverty Tour,” “Wright place, wrong pastor,” “Love Client #9,” “Ivory and Ebony” and “The Star Spanglish banner.”

Several of the track titles, including “Barack the Magic Negro,” are written in bold font.

The song, which debuted on Limbaugh’s show in late March 2007, latches onto an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times of the same title. That column, penned by cultural critic David Ehrenstein, argued that Obama could serve as a balm to whites who felt guilty about past treatment of African Americans.

Limbaugh first highlighted the column the day it ran, according to a contemporary report by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog agency. Media Matters reported Limbaugh repeated the phrase more than two dozen times the day the column ran.

The following month, Shanklin debuted his version of the song, sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and performed in Shanklin’s impression of Al Sharpton.

“See, real black men, like Snoop Dogg, or me, or Farrakhan, have talked the talk, and walked the walk, not come in late and won,” one verse in the song says.

Saltsman said he meant nothing untoward by forwarding what amounts to a joke more at Ehrenstein’s expense than at Obama’s.

“Paul Shanklin is a long-time friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for the Rush Limbaugh show are light-hearted political parodies,” Saltsman said.

Republicans searching for ways to attack Obama have been hesitant to embrace any reference to his race. Limbaugh presciently predicted his allusion to the column nearly two years ago would win attention from left-leaning organizations that would suggest he was using Obama’s race against him.

 

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Unbelievable.

 

Obama the 'Magic Negro'
The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man.
By David Ehrenstein
L.A.-based DAVID EHRENSTEIN writes about Hollywood and politics.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story

March 19, 2007

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."

Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

The same can't quite be said of Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Seven" and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in "The Shining," in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." The film's sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you?

And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton's whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial "goodwill.")

But the same can't be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son.

The senator's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, "magically." He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?

The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.

Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).

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.

 

The song is amazing display of satire at the lunacy that is race politics which is today dominated, manufactured and processed by the Left.

I love the Al Sharpton impression of using the megaphone to sing the song.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/294494,CST-NWS-obama13.article#

People should educate themselves before jumping to predetermined conclusions of the media.

 

funny chit


http://www.paulshanklin.com/wehatetheusa.html

 

When it absolutely, positively has to be in bad taste, RNC delivers.

 

Uh, dork who sang this song, there is a sheet on your head, you might want to take it off, it's a little....noticable.

 

No surprise that the reichtards that make up >95% of the Repugnican party would jump on race at every possible opportunity.

Remember when the RNC actually tried to sell that "Big Tent" bullshit a few election cycles ago, as if nobody would notice their conventions looked more and more like Klan rallies? ROTFL

Black Republicans are self-hating, bootlicking toadies. Impossible that they don't know that they're just window dressing.

 

White liberals are self-hating, bootlicking toadies. Impossible that they don't know that they're just window dressing.

are we actually supposed to feel bad because of slavery a couple of centuries back? I don't feel bad about it, never been a southerner, never owned a negro, wouldn't want one if you gave it to me actually, big pain in the ass. As long as they are all in the ghetto or DC and work for the government or get welfare, I don't have to even see them much because I work in the private sector. I've been looking for the black workers in the private sector for decades now, they still don't show up there at all.... bullshit Democrats were supposed to fix the problem of discrimination for about a hundred years now, still no blacks working in the private sector. Why is that? Glad you asked, it's because Democrats do everything in their power to keep them on welfare and in public sector jobs so they will stay on the reservation..... What the hell does everybody think that Jessie Jackoffson is supposed to be accomplishing by suing the private sector over every black worker that ever ventures therein? Is he working to get them more jobs? Hell no, he's getting rich and ensuring that no business will ever hire a black worker. So I'm supposed to feel bad because blacks are perpetually unhappy and hating me? Not really, I feel pretty damn good nowadays, you liberal bullshit artists are going to get yours in the upcoming economic maelstorm, that is not going to bother me either...