I’d just like to point out that the man in black-face in the image beside Obama, Al Jolson, was actually a good early civil rights advocate, and the best singer of the first half of the twentieth century, to boot.
And I’m fairly positive Ace of Spades coined the phrase “magic retard” a week or so before David Ehrenstein’s column was published.
As I recall, he noted then that most of the more popular ‘magic retards’, the simple minded with the hearts of gold, were portrayed as African Americans. Joe Coffee from The Green Mile and Radio from ‘Radio’ being the most high-profile.
The rationale behind coining the phrase was to give a short-hand to the practice of script-writers inserting members of marginalized groups as props that assist protagonists, while getting no treatment in the scripts as developed characters in their own right.
Without the short-hand, we’re forced to elaborate on the concept in run-on sentences, see.
