The best thing I can say about The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it has an intriguing premise. A satire about the Magical Negro trope with a bit of magic and romance thrown in sounded fun. Then came the trailer. The function of a trailer is to get butts in seats, but all this one did was make me want to run away. If I hadn’t already agreed to review it, I would’ve skipped it. Hopefully you will make better choices than I did.
Aren (Justice Smith) is afraid of upsetting white people. He’s passive and apologetic with enough self-loathing that he should probably see a therapist. That makes him a prime candidate for The American Society of Magical Negroes, a historic, secret group of Black Americans who have dedicated their lives to making white people feel better. (A group founded by enslaved Africans at Monticello, in case you needed a reason to scream.) An angry white person is a risk to Black lives, so, the thinking goes, let’s make sure white people are always comfortable. “We’re showing the client the parts of ourselves that make them feel good, and nothing more.” The Magical Negro is a trope where a Black person, often a man, exists solely to offer support and comfort, often of a mystical nature, to a white person. It’s on the same spectrum as the Sassy/Token Black Friend and the Mammy. The Magical Negro is a counter to the post-Reconstruction era trope of the Black Buck, an aggressive, violent, large Black man usually found threatening the virtue of innocent white women (see Birth of a Nation, or, better yet, don’t waste your time) and the Tragic Mulatto (or quadroon or octoroon) where a Black woman with a white father cannot fit into either Black or white society and dies as a result.
Aren is brought into the fold by Roger (David Alan Grier), an old hand at the white fragility game. Aren thrives in his new role. His first client, Jason (Drew Tarver), is a mediocre white man careening through his career at a Facebook-esque tech company with unearned confidence. As the story progresses, Jason’s entitlement shifts from annoying to suffocating, especially as both men pursue Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), their biracial white and Asian coworker. Eventually, Aren is forced to choose between his job and his love life. All this culminates in a confrontation hampered by confounding editing choices and a speech that undermines and misunderstands everything that came before.
The only things we know about Aren’s background is that he has a white mother and that he went to the Rhode Island School of Design (a school that as far as I can tell has few Black students and a lot of white ones). He’s financially well off enough to afford a spacious studio apartment in downtown Los Angeles despite being a failed yarn artist. Aren is a blank space where a person should be. Every other character is just as poorly developed. It’s hard to care about any of these people if we know hardly anything about them. What does Lizzie like about Aren? What does he like about her? Writer and director Kobi Libii doesn’t seem to care. Smith and Bogan have chemistry, but it has nowhere to go in the script. Even Los Angeles barely exists as a place. They shot multiple scenes on location, but they might as well have been on a sound stage for all the impact the city had on the characters. The magic makes no sense and feels more like the script had the note “INSERT SOMETHING ABOUT MAGIC HERE” instead of actual worldbuilding.
Proximity to whiteness is a real problem with this movie. I spent the entire hour and forty-four minutes alternately cringing and desperately wanting Aren to speak to another Black person outside the Society. Any Black person. Literally any. Los Angeles is only 8.6% Black (and 48% Latinx) but Aren exclusively spends time in spaces predominately white spaces. Truly a feat in a region as racially diverse as Southern California. As someone who has spent most of my life living and working in predominately white spaces, I’m well acquainted with having to balance my sanity with white fragility. But I also know the first thing you do when you get a job like that is find the other BIPOC and form a community. You need someone to talk to when white people and Pick Mes get out of hand. There are two Black people at his job, and Aren never even acknowledges them. The movie isn’t invested enough in its premise to bother exploring it that deeply.
The movie’s worst crime, however, is its reliance on individual solutions to systemic problems. Bear with me here because we have to go back to Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington and Du Bois are often seen as two sides of the same coin: very basically, assimilation and economic independence on the Washington side, education and civil rights on the other. Both wanted the same thing, equality, but one believed we could earn it by being productive members of society and following the rules set forth by whiteness while the other believed the Talented Tenth was the key to freedom.
The movie intentionally signals these outdated approaches to civil rights. The clothing and accouterments of the Society are all late 19th and early 20th century, when both men were active. Society members all seem to believe they can respectability politics their way into safety. They believe they are saving the world and their own lives by making white people happy. They believe that if Black folks can manage enough white feelings, Black people will be safe. How you hold onto that in the face of Jim Crow and the pushback against the Civil Rights Movement and BLM is beyond me, and the film never brings it up. Nor does it bring up the fact that the Society was founded during the height of the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan (here comes Birth of a Nation again). During this era, a lot of white people found happiness in violence against Black folks. They held picnics at lynchings, posed for photos with their children smiling ear to ear with a body hanging in the middle, and sold off pieces of their victims as souveniers. Keeping white folks happy didn’t keep Black folks alive back then and doesn’t now because the problem isn’t individual white people but the entire damn system.
That disconnect is ripe for exploration. However, that requires the script to be willing to dive head first into satire, and it either can’t or won’t. It is an unsuccessful satire that veers too often into sincerity. It pulls its punches and seems to fundamentally misunderstand the trope it’s trying to deconstruct and what good critique looks like. It wants to be insightful without having any real insight into the Black experience. There are kernels of truth here and there, but every time it comes close to addressing one it instead sails right past. Sometimes it tries to be an intracommunity conversation about identity and navigating whiteness, but it wanders away from that conversation every time Lizzie shows up.
Ultimately, it’s better than the trailer let on to be, but that’s a low bar to cross. It is neither a good satire nor a good romcom. It has nothing to say and nothing to show.
