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    'The American Society of Magical Negroes': You don't wanna join this club

    The film is convinced Black people on screen and in real life are, by and large, contending with the same stereotypes and barriers that we were 20 years ago.
    by Aisha Harris Mar 15, 2024 5 minutes
    Aren (Justice Smith) and Roger (David Alan Grier) in <em>The American Society of Magical Negroes.</em>

    Lately, I've been musing on the concept of time and its relationship to Black art and identity. I keep bumping into this question: What time do we all think we're living in right now?

    In the year of someone's lord 2024, a recent episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans conjured up James Baldwin – the same James Baldwin who once wrote, "I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt" – as a Magical Negro to Truman Capote.

    A straight-faced excavation of this old Hollywood trope, which has been on the wane for some time, is startling enough. But now there's also Kobi Libii's feature debut, which attempts to skewer it. The comedy writer and performer imagines an underground network of Black mystics who

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