Besides the frustratingly bare bones character development of Aren, we aren’t told much about this magical society beyond the fact that it dates back to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Its leader, a larger-than-life Dede (a criminally underused Nicole Byer), floats in the air and presents the final and most important rule of the society: should you ever put your needs ahead of the client’s, all of the magical negroes will lose their powers. It’s a daunting and almost too on-the-nose reflection of the discourse that pierces through the Black diaspora today. Should the desires and goals of the whole supercede the individual’s? What about when those goals don’t make sense anymore? These are questions (and subsequent answers) that I so desperately wanted The American Society of Magical Negroes to dig into but, again, the film never quite gets there. Any film about Black people is inherently a film about community, so it’s disappointing that we don’t really see that community in any robust or substantial way. Why does the society still persist today? What keeps them in such strict loyalty to one another? What are Roger’s motivations to remain within it after decades of service? What community does Aren even come from?
Source link
