Another aspect of this puzzle to explore is the concept of the “magical negro.” A trope long used in the movie industry, this idea is defined by the planting of a black character using vaguely defined wisdom or mystical powers to teach or help a white protagonist (think the characters that Morgan Freeman plays). However, the ad world appears to be somewhat aware of this. In industry reporting on the subject, they stress “avoid(ing) tokenism” and “don’t force diversity” without offering any real metrics on how to avoid these faux pas’.(20) In his controversial article “Obama the ‘Magic Negro,’” David Ehrenstein compared then presidential candidate Barack Obama to the “magical negro” stereotype: “Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.”(21)

Though commercial actors don’t hold the sway of our 44th president, they serve a similar purpose. What is occurring in modern advertising and media writ-large is the usage of the black population as a meme for American consumerism and a representation of our society as a whole. In today’s age of race-based politics and social issues, these sentiments have been commodified by capital—symbolized by the advertising version of the magical negro—with the specific aim of selling people, especially blacks, more stuff they don’t need. Blacks comprising only 13% of the American population would seemingly render this idea silly, but as mentioned above, the ability of capitalism to co-opt organic sentiment and commodify it by way of “increasingly extensive campaigns'' has brought us to this current state of projecting a population that does not exist in the numbers or cultural milieu advertised.

Though the age of being “colorblind” to race is dead, aspects of this outlook could be beneficial to society as far as mitigating advertising’s exploitation of specific demographics. Using African Americans as a meme for consumerism in America is comparably detrimental to that community's well-being as fast food and tobacco is to their health. The marriage of ontologically-based identity politics with economic-based class politics has brought American society into an increasingly fake form of existence, and recognizing this is necessary to understanding capitalism’s impact on our society as a whole.
https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/w...verrepresented