More West Wing chat

Lindsay's response to my criticism of the West Wing is worth promoting from comments:

David, you're confused on the subject of Magical Negroes. You're mixing them up with the concept of Competent Humans.

Firstly, a Magical Negro is never in a true position of recognzied power in society. Secondly, their power is always connected to the earth and to a spiritual truth that white people (excepting Southern women and Bohemian women) are allegedly not connected to. The conceit of a Magical Negro as a hackneyed story device is to help the main white character connect with that spirituality. No character on the West Wing does that, ever; least of all the black characters. What the black characters do, however, do is to constantly demonstrate to the show's liberal characters that even in their open-mindedness, they're sometimes total cocks about race, by assuming again and again that black will always stick with black. And this I find genuinely satisfying, as it a) sometimes needs doing and b) actually often ends up being the tedious work that a black person will have to do when a white person is unwittingly being a cock.

The characters you point to merely happen to be black. Their competence, intelligence, insight, and warmth is not an indicator of a Magical Negro character. It's a competent, intelligent, insightful, warm character who happens to be black. Go back and look at scenes between Charlie and Barlet, Fitzwallace and Bartlet, and so on. You'll notice that their being black doesn't really have anything to do with it, it's the position they hold. Whereas with a truly insulting Magical Negro character, it has everything to do with race. That's what's so insulting about the Magical Negro/Wiccan Woman character - that merely by being black/a woman, you're plugged in. Sorkin's desire to write well-rounded, compassionate black characters is just that. He writes very strong female characters too.

The reason the white characters are the only ones fucking up is because they're the main characters. So obviously, they're going to have wins and losses, good choices and bad choices. Main characters simply have the freedom and longevity to be more well-rounded. And really, Sorkin just likes moding his characters. Sometimes it's a black person putting them in their place, sometimes it's a Republican, sometimes it's a call-girl ... any variety of characters are doing the moding, not just the black characters.

Anyway, that's my argument against calling Charlie, a young, intelligent, college age black man a Magical Negro. There's an injustice in that. You may as well call Obama a Magical Negro. It's off-base. I thought there was something off in your calling Tim Gunn a Magical Gay the other night too, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. But it's clearer after reading this post. Someone being FUCKING AWESOME isn't what makes them a Magical ____. It just makes them FUCKING AWESOME.

Alright, I take your point--I think I was conflating awesomeness and Magical-ness. Clearly, Charlie is very awesome, which is completely different from being spiritually plugged in and close to the earth, which is what the Magical Negro concept is all about. Charlie is no Bagger Vance.

However, though I might have been misapplying the "Magical Negro" concept, I think there is still something off--or at least, dated--about the way black characters are treated in the West Wing in the aggregate. What I mean is, I don't think any one black character taken in isolation is anything to raise an eyebrow at. But what is conspicuous is a pattern where every black character, without fail, is super-awesome and, indeed, super-emblematic-of-what-America-is-really-all-about: humble, hardworking, magnanimous, competent, fair, pragmatic. After a while you suspect that Sorkin is being a little too self-aware with his black characters--that he is so afraid of reinforcing negative stereotypes that he forgets that black people can be jerks too.

Again, I only bring all this up because I think it contributes to a peculiar 90s feeling to the series. I am accusing Sorkin of nothing more than pre-South-Park, pre-Curb-Your-Enthusiasm unreconstructed political correctness (Curb--and to some extent Seinfeld as well--are masterful at leveraging political correctness to wreak cognitive dissonance on the viewer. For example, a character in a protected category--say someone who is disabled--will invariably turn out to be a complete asshole). Even it it's true, it's really no big sin.

So, anyway. All of this is based on the first 8 episodes--it could be that episode 9 features a cut-throat, heartless black lobbyist who gets pwned by Josh Lyman, and I'll have to eat my hat. But I won't be holding my breath.

PS: I think there was some kind of blogging Murphy's Law going on with the first West Wing post, because it was a fairly dumb post, and yet for some reason received like 3 times as much traffic as any other post to date. Maybe if I write a really dumb post it will really boost traffic...