Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's article on "Stephen King's Super-Duper Magical Negroes" in Strange Horizons 25 October 2004 is well worth reading. My answer, below:

Okorafor-Mbachu gives us a fascinating and well-informed critique of the "magical negro" construct. In the article, she questions its origins, which seem lost in time. However, I'd like to suggest that the lost origins of this construct are not only still quite current but also likely to become a growing issue for fantastic genre modes: that is, a white-identified, European-American sense of separation from folk roots, out of which magical ideation almost always springs in narrative. Celtic folks roots have become the commonplace amongst contemporary white writers as the source of magic. However, the very commodification of Celtic folk roots within American culture has rendered that mode less authentic as well as less immediately creative. I sat not a year ago with a white Canadian fantasy writer who bemoaned her own lack of minority origins. She wanted to move away from Celtic sources--which she could not even legitimately own, given her English and German heritage--but did not feel she should appropriate minority cultures (that is cultures of color) for her work.

So, white writers have turned to other folk traditions as sources of magic, those which are related to their own more broadly American (or Canadian, etc.) social cultures, if not originating, ancestral ones. These writers tend, like King, to be ones who hold liberal attitudes toward race. Their assignation of magic (that is, folk authenticity) and nobility (sacrifice) to minorities has to do, I would argue, not with an implicit denigration of or utility value for people of color, but a growing sense of their own (white) race's disconnect from an authentic culture of origin (the reasons for this are complicated, but have to do with the general decline of white ethnic identity in the media, the atomization of society and movement away from family and community traditions centering on ethnicity among whites, an increased minority cultural presence that monologizes white identity).

Moreover, I'd like to suggest that these white writers are motivated not just by a sense of their own culture's inadequacy as a source of magic, but equally importantly by the sense of minority culture's having preserved a greater link to their cultural traditions, even if these are ones fabricated through a romanticized white imagination. Moreover, to liberal whites, minority figures become especially desirable as morally privileged figures because of their people's historical victimization. Although Okorafor-Mbachu makes a good point that the magical negro figure may actually reproduce such patterns of victimization through the minority figure's objectification, effacement, and function as an assist to whites, the figure also achieves its empowerment through the logic of victim politics (which, in the modern literary period and after also led to Jewish folk tradition as a source of fantasy, one that may even be reflected in the extra-narrative but now hip Kabbalah movement among the goyim). Contemporary writers' self-consciousness about the magical negro / noble minority construct has become so pronounced, that often we are now able to see a new turn on the old screw: blacks are being given heroic and leadership positions, such as the Oracle and Morpheus of The Matrix, and whites (especially older white men) are being given villain positions (God, Agent Smith, the Judas). Moreover, the usual protagonists of fantasy and action films, which have long been white male rebels over more conservatively scripted white male heroes, are now shifting toward female and minority figures.

In American action cinema of the last decade or so, I have noticed a corresponding increase not only in the regular presence of a black male amongst the survivors of violence, when the main protagonist / hero is a white male, but a tendency of that black male to either be the sole survivor with a white female (the white male hero makes the sacrifice) or to the one who sacrifices himself that the white male and white female might have a romantic ending. The pattern is so pronounced that it is possible to predict that last three individuals standing at the end of films, based solely on gender and color. The motivation for this is a desire for inclusiveness, for multicultural sensitivity, for racial awareness on Hollywood's part. We can find claim -- and reasonably so -- that this is Hollywood's not having gone far enough, or American society's not having come far enough. But, the fact remains that this is likely a transitional strategy that seeks greater inclusiveness and cultural prestige for minorities.

The problem for fantasy authorship, however, remains: Where can or should white European-American writers go for an authentic (seeming) source of magic in their work? What can they legitimately own? What folk roots are left to them, given on the one hand the overexposure and tired exploitation of existing origins (however tenuous time renders them) and on the other hand the cultural revision of those roots into something perhaps less than heroic and socially inclusive?