“Say what you want about Rush Limbaugh. He’s brash, abrasive, and makes some outlandish statements. However, if you are going to publish a piece on him, please get your facts straight. Rush Limbaugh did not call Barack Obama a Magic Negro. He was quoting an op-ed piece by columnist David Ehrenstein from the L.”
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Say what you want about Rush Limbaugh. He’s brash, abrasive, and makes some outlandish statements.

However, if you are going to publish a piece on him, please get your facts straight.

Rush Limbaugh did not call Barack Obama a Magic Negro. He was quoting an op-ed piece by columnist David Ehrenstein from the L.A. Times, a paper he deems as liberal, which said, The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education.

Limbaugh said, If I refer to Obama the rest of the day as the ‘Magic Negro,’ there will be a number of people in the drive-by media and on left-wing blogs who will credit me for coming up with it and ignore the L.A. Times did it, simply because they can’t be critical of the L.A. Times, but they can, obviously, be critical of talk radio.

His comments on white racism, which Curwin claimed were Limbaugh’s own views, were nothing more than him quoting Ehrenstein, who said, (The Magic Negro)’s there to assuage white ‘guilt’ (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

In response to this article, it was Limbaugh who, in fact, called Ehrenstein’s comments racist.

The song they played, Barack the Magic Negro, was then a parody of what Limbaugh says is the hypocrisy of the liberal media: those who write articles asking Is Barack Obama black enough? while then criticizing whites who support Obama as being racist.

Perhaps your journalists can research the entire story from now on instead of cherry-picking information to distort the truth and further their own agenda.

Josh Johnston
Graduate student
Engineering Applied Mathematics

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