THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC

As if Barack Obama did not face enough obstacles, the junior senator from Illinois with Oval Office aspirations is likened to a "magic negro" by David Ehrenstein. The "magic negro" is a cultural and cinematic racial stereotype exemplified by some of the characters played by Sidney Poitier, Scatman Crothers, Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle and others.

Charismatic, courageous, insightful, or in some other way magically endowed, they enter a plot, virtually from nowhere, to help a white protagonist. "He's there to assuage white guilt," Ehrenstein says, "while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest." (More Don Cheadle stories.)