The American Society of Magical Negroes

A young black man named Aren gets recruited into a secret society of magical black people who dedicate their lives to making white people's lives easier in order to lessen the chance that a white person being scared, angry, or confused might end up leading to the death of a black person. Initially enamored with his new powers, Aren begins to question the value of using supernatural means to do the very thing he's felt obligated to do his whole life.

Originally coined by Spike Lee over twenty years ago, a Magical Negro is a stereotyped Black character, generally regarded as an offensive representation of Black people, whose role primarily involves assisting a white protagonist, typically by providing magical assistance and/or helpful folk wisdom. e.g. The Green Mile, or The Legend of Bagger Vance.

Aren is a young black artist who specializes in yarn sculptures. The opening of the film takes place at a small gallery, and shows how Aren can’t sell his art to the bougie white upper middle class art collector crowd once they see that he’s black. And while I totally believe that, just like I believe that even though Aren has a white mom, white people still view him as black, because just one drop is all white people care about, I also think it’s fair to suggest that perhaps the main reason why Aren can’t sell any of his art is because his art is yarn sculptures.

Anyway, The American Society of Magical Negroes is a film that really tries to be wicked satire, but in the end, it just can’t pull it off. The film is rooted in the right place. The basic idea driving the plot is a simple one to understand if you’re not considered white, and it’s a simple question…

What’s the most dangerous animal on the whole planet?

The answer of course, is white people, especially when they’re uncomfortable.

The American Society of Magical Negroes are a secret society of magic-users who move unnoticed through the world with a single aim: Keep white people happy, so that white people don’t hurt black people. When Society member Roger approaches Aren to recruit him, and Aren is hesitant, Roger walks him through our American society, letting him stumble unprotected into random encounters with white people, reminding him how the discomfort of white people is the loudest thing in every room you walk into. He poses a question for Aren to consider: “Why are you so nice? …Is it because white people will kill you if you aren’t?”

Aaron soon joins this Hogwarts-ish society of powerful mystics, with their hidden backrooms, and their strange rules, and he is soon assigned to help a young white man named Jason.

Each member of the Society is assigned a white person in crisis who is dangerously close to taking out their anxieties on innocent Black people. Using a "white tears meter" the Society member is able to monitor the threat level of their white person at any given moment. The Society member’s job is to befriend their white person and to then guide them through their issues using magic and black wisdom until the white person get whatever it is they want.

Aren's white guy is Jason. Jason is a mostly good-natured, superhumanly obtuse, almost instinctually selfish, mediocre tech bro at a software company called MeetBox, a Facebook kind of thing. Jason believes with every fiber of his being that he deserves a promotion, all while he very obviously doesn’t deserve it. Aren is placed at MeetBox in order to support and compliment Jason in a way that will help Jason to get that promotion.

The problem is… Aren had a coffee-shop meet-cute with a colleague named Lizzie. Lizzie is a paint-by-numbers elder Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She is also Jason’s “work wife.” Aren is immediately into her. This becomes a problem when Jason realizes that he is also into her, because Aren can’t compete with Jason, he can only support, which means not pursuing someone who might be the love of his life, because if he wins her heart, then Jason loses, and he can’t let that happen. Doing anything else apparently shorts out everyone’s magic at the Society.

In order to prevent this catastrophe from happening, should any member of the Society be found guilty of putting themselves first over their white people, they will be banished from the society, stripped of their magic, and sentenced to live the rest of their lives as a regular black person in America, a sentence they all know most likely means a very short life capped off with a very violent death.

Eventually, Aaron can’t take it any more. He tells off the white people, professes his love to Lizzie, possibly while revealing the secrets of Black people magic to the entire world, and… nothing bad happens. As far as climaxes go, it’s all unearned and mostly feels like the result of half-hearted and failed attempts to find the film’s ending, and when it didn’t work out, the filmmakers just gave up and said fuck it.

The only twist is that it turns out that Lizzie actually belongs to a secret group called SoSwag, which is the Society of Supportive Wives and Girlfriends, revealing that all along, Aren was her assigned Man to support through his crisis.

This is a film that jumps, and falls in a heap.

It’s an absolute failure. It’s too unfocused, too muddled. There’s too many clashing tones. It feels like the end result of too many re-writes, and the product of a surface level understanding of the topics that are being satirized. On top of that, it’s way too polite to be satire, especially as it feels like the main point of this film was just to make the white people who were watching it feel comfortable. Worst of all, the whole root idea of the film feels wrong. The Society very obviously views itself as heroes, and I just can’t wrap my mind around why. Placating a racist society, “going along to get along,” even if it’s being done with the idea that you’re protecting oppressed people within that society… that’s bad. Respectability politics do not change the world, they only keep the bad shit the same, and the people who are most responsible for the bad shit comfortable. The point of the film makes no sense to me, and the ending makes it all worse. I don’t even understand what the satire intended to skewer.

I mean… why not use this magic to make things better?

Plus, and this is strictly from a nerd point of view… the magic system here doesn’t make any sense. Where does it come from? Who can do it? Why? There’s no answers in the film. There’s nothing really at all in this film, in fact. It’s empty, it’s boring, it’s ramshackle, and it is most definitely under-cooked, this film is nothing but an all-around failure that is best ignored.

Thumbs down.