Entertainment is a lot of things. It can inspire, and it can inform, but one of its most prominent uses, especially for your average person, is a vehicle for escapism. We like watching or reading people do spectacular things we find interesting or to be beyond our scope of accomplishing.
We also, just at times, enjoy watching trainwrecks, which a lot of entertainment can end up being if not handled properly. The chance to escape your reality and temporarily trade it for a new one is a universally appealing prospect that many forms of media provide. But recently, it seems that one group of people seem to be excluded from that escapism and chained to the trauma that they do not need to click on a television screen to experience.
This question stemmed from the release of a trailer for the upcoming satirical fantasy comedy movie, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.” The film is set to release in theaters on March 22, and it stars Justice Smith as a young man who is recruited into a secret society of African Americans whose sole purpose is to make the lives of white people easier. People immediately began to share their disappointment with the trailer due to the fact that another Black story seemed to center around white people.
The main character was not being exposed to the world of magic not because he was a Harry Potter-esque hero destined to save the world, but because he was just the newest in a long line of Black servants dedicated to making white people more comfortable. This was not appealing to a lot of people because white people get to exist in their magical worlds with no strings attached. The only reason why they are the chosen ones is not because they have to use their powers to benefit another race, but just because they are allowed to exist.
I understand that the movie is meant to poke fun at the “magical negro” trope and how ridiculous it is, and maybe it is going to state that Black people have their own lives that do not center on making white people comfortable, but the trailer does little to show that. Imagine if they had done something new like making the lives of Black people more “comfortable” in movies, proving that the creed of catering to white people is a thing of the past. The United States has a long way to go in terms of true equality, but we are in a state where African Americans for the most part can exist independently without feeling the need to prove or validate themselves to white people. Imagine if we had a movie telling us the same thing.
The release of the trailer began to have people wonder if escapism is something that Black people can truly have. 75% of the media we release usually has something to do with Black trauma, such as slavery, Civil Rights or police brutality. Usually, the Black people in this movie are downtrodden and impoverished. I am not saying that these are stories that should not be told and that Black people do not experience these terrible things, but why are we the only race that is not allowed escapism? Why do most of our stories have to come with a hint of sadness and grief? Why do most of our stories have to center around how white people treat us and how we have to condition ourselves to survive around them?
I can only list a handful of movies where a Black person was the lead, which did not directly tie into their race. I am not saying that a person’s race is not important, because it makes them who they are, but when an entire piece of media is just “being Black is terrible,” that is depressing. As I stated before, white people do not have these things in their movies. Batman is not Batman because of his race, Harry Potter did not beat Voldemort because he was white, and it is the same for a myriad of other white heroes in movies, books and television shows.
The crazy thing to me is that I believe that the reason why movies centered around Black pain and trauma tend to be greenlit more by Hollywood is because there is the belief that they will sell better. In Hollywood’s eyes, people are only interested in watching Black people be terrorized for hours on end. But recent Hollywood movies have proven that this is not the case. Movies such as “Across the Spider-Verse,” “Black Panther” and “Nope,” along with novels such as “Children of Blood and Bone,” have seen critical and commercial success, proving that Black led stories that do not have plots directly tied to their Blackness and how white people react to them can exist.