Reading "The Boondocks"

I'm one of those people who buy a paper, flip past all the front sections, and go straight for the comics page. Maybe it's avoidance--this backwards progression from humor to horror. Nowadays though, "The Boondocks" is enough justification for my indolence.

Created by Aaron McGruder, a 25-year-old who is one of less than ten black cartoonist to have ever been in syndication, "the Boondocks" sports striking artwork, a brash attitude, and an unflinching portrayal of racial politics and identity. Focusing on the experiences of two young black boys forced to move from black southside Chicago to the lily-white suburb of Woodcrest, the strip mercilessly shakes up the previously apolitical--read: conservative and reactionary--space of the comics page. Moreover, for a nation struggling with questions of race and identity, "The Boondocks" might very well be the new test of cultural literacy in hip-hop America. What other comic strip expects its readers to understand the humor in a thug wannabe enjoying Lauren Hill or a black boy indignant that his elementary school is named after J. Edgar Hoover?

Since its April 1999 debut, "The Boondocks" has expanded to over 150 newspapers nationally, one of the comic industry's fastest and most successful rises ever--and one of its most controversial. Irate and delighted readers have sent hundreds of letters to newspaper editors, showering the strip with either vitriol or praise. Some readers have dropped their subscriptions in protest and a handful of small, local newspapers have canceled the strip. The national circuit of talk shows and news programs has pulled McGruder into the thick, suddenly thrusting the young cartoonist into the impossible role of national spokesperson. Race, it seems, is no laughing matter, even in the funnies.

Furor From Left, Right, and Middle

It doesn't take a critical race scholar to note that the comics page is perhaps the most homogenous part of a newspaper--even the advertising is more integrated. In the midst of all this unquestioned whiteness, McGruder sweeps in to drop a color-coated bomb. The strip's main character, Huey Freeman (named after the Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton) is a self-styled "radical scholar" and "eternally scornful champion of the dispossessed," a prophet of rage in training who spends his early days in Woodcrest forming a one-man Klanwatch and interrogating random white neighbors with a baseball bat. In the series up to July 4th, Huey roundly points out the hypocrisy of a "free" nation founded on slavery and he incisively lampoons the racist fantasy of Gone With the Wind. Clearly, this is no "Family Circus."

Not surprisingly, these kinds of themes have earned "The Boondocks" its share of virulent opposition. K. Barna, in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, writes, "Switch the words from white people to black people and you'd have a lawsuit on your hands. This kind of 'humor' only continues to perpetuate hate and racial division, and I, for one, have no interest in participating." Put more directly by D. Thompson from Minneapolis in "The Boondocks" own online guest book, "['The Boondocks'} is a disgusting hateful piece of garbage!!!! Get it out of the paper."

However, it's not just defensive whites who have a gripe with the strip, "The Boondocks" has also raised the ire of those within the African American community, mostly older people and professionals, who accuse the strip of perpetuating stereotypes of black youth. In a critique that seems reminiscent of the castigation that followed Robin Harris' "BeBe Kids" routine, black readers have denounced the portrayal of Riley Freeman, Huey's younger brother who sports a black hoodie and scowling mug. Consider him a Detroit Red to Huey's Malcolm X.

In reaction to Riley's portrait of a thug as a young man, "Helen" asks in "The Boondocks" online guest book, "Is our entire culture based around poverty and 'jail'?" Baltimore's "Summar" suggests, "As I read the comic, I envisioned a group of Klansmen sharing it over coffee...Although it seems you're 'keeping it real' on the surface, you're selling us all out for a laugh."

McGruder has also managed to offend the multiracial community through the inclusion of character Jazmine DuBois, a biracial (black dad/white mom) girl who moves into Woodcrest soon after the Freemans. McGruder describes Jazmine as someone "struggling to find her identity at the border of the color line." Some have blasted the strip for suggesting that biracial children are inherently confused. In a recent issue of the Interracial Voice, (www.webcom.com/~intvoice/), the "voice of conscience of the global mixed-race/interracial movement," editor Charles Michael Byrd accuses McGruder of "wielding [power] in a racist manner that those on the left, the right, and in the middle can plainly see" in his portrayal of Jazmine.

Laughing in Exile

"White humorist have a long history of sharp satire and their audiences have learned to recognize it and understand the serious issues behind it while still being able to laugh," argues McGruder. "I don't do 'The Cosby Show' [with its] over-romanticized, bourgie portrayals of Black America which spread interracial classism."

Instead, "The Boondocks" brand of satire leaps backwards over the politically stale black humor of the 1980s and '90s. Compared to both Bill Cosby's bourgeois idolatry and Eddie Murphy's self-loathing caricatures of black life, "The Boondocks" shares more in common with the radical black comics of the 1970s, exemplified by Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, and Dick Gregory's embrace of political commentary as well as incisive, humorous celebrations of blackness. As McGruder puts it, "['The Boondocks'] presents a nice allegory to this larger notion of displacement of black people and us being in a foreign land as a people."

Robin D.G. Kelley, black cultural critic and author of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional, has closely followed the strip. "That there is controversy over the strip reveals the pitiful state of racial discourse," Kelley says. "It's not as if 'The Boondocks' is taking some kind of militant nationalist stance; the characters speak instead to the boundary crossing, hybridity, and the problems young black people in a post-civil rights suburban content must face. McGruder finds humor in alienation and a sort of spatial and racial exile, and this problem has been a source of humor for centuries."

Is it a Cartoon or is it Hip-Hop

What's new is the strip's explicit hip-hop attitude. Even the strip's cultural hijacking of newspapers resembles hip-hop's use of the music industry to package and distribute nuggets of black political thought. McGruder is a self-professed hip-hop junkie and his strip got an early pre-syndication boost by running in The Source , the world's most circulated rap magazine. McGruder shares, "I represent hip-hop in the context of it being an evolution of the collective black experience. I look at 'The Boondocks' as being a hip-hop strip in the sense that I grew up loving hip-hop."

University of Virginia ethnomusicology professor Kyra Gaunt says, "Many [of the strip's} detractors from the black and white community may also be opponents of commercial and underground rap, using a cartoon espousing hip-hop's cultural values as a scapegoat representing a larger and more complex problem that McGruder is not responsible for, in and of himself."

Yet, if "the Boondocks" is a symbol of hip-hop's uneasy position within the American imagination, it also perpetuates some of the same problems for which hop-hop is notorious. In the 1996 parody of black "hood" films, Don't Be a Menace, actress Vivica Fox plays a professional back woman who jokes to her son (Jamie Foxx), "You know there aren't any positive black women in these films"--and then promptly disappears from the rest of the movie. "The Boondocks" goes one better--there are no black women in the strip. The Freemans' mother and grandmothers are noticeably absent--their crusty grandfather is the only adult family member present. Save the biracial Jazmine, whose character doesn't self-identify as black, there are no black women to be found in Woodcrest yet.

The erasure of black women from "The Boondocks" mirrors a similar vacuum within hip-hop music, a point raised repeatedly by black feminist scholars such as Tricia Rose and bell hooks. UVA's Gaunt says, "as an African American woman, and a professor of hip-hop music...I would voice my own concern about the overgeneralized use of black cultural nationalistic stereotypes and the exclusion of mother figures and non-biracially identified black females. McGruder is a bold voice, but not a wise voice yet."

Gaunt also takes "The Boondocks" to task for its distillation of racial diversity to familiar black/white monochromatics, insightfully observing that "most suburban communities today are multi ethnic when it comes to hip-hop. McGruder is scripting an imaginary past or a stripped down present where only blacks and whites are the primary playa haters and authenticators." "The Boondocks" engages many of the key issues that circulate in hip hop America, but doesn't necessarily transcend them. In short, "The Boondocks" presents a vision of a masculine America in strictly black and white--even if it is published in color on Sundays.

Toppling Sacred Cows

Yet, many fail to understand that Riley's gangsterisms are an internal critique of hip-hop's excesses, especially its penchant for nihilism and materialism. Riley is a walking stereotype of the gangsta rapper, but his own ridiculous extremes are meant to be a caricature, not a promotion. If people miss the point--and judging from the responses the strip has gotten, many clearly have--why is it incumbent upon McGruder to teach readers the finer points of humor, sarcasm, and satire?

More importantly, "The Boondocks" shares hip-hop's strength in forcing a conversation around race when the national media would rather flatten society to a white-normative standard. Huey's attacks on hallowed American institutions of white privilege--the educational system, July 4th celebrations, suburban life writ large--encode a not-so-hidden transcript of dissent that speaks to many of the frustrations people of color share. Compared to the blanched, apolitical spate of cartoons that greet people's morning routine, "The Boondocks" jostles readers from casual complacency; it is an act of resistance in a time of racial crisis.

That's one of the reasons why I turn to "The Boondocks" first. I take delight in how is confronts and topples many scared cows of American liberalism and conservatism by putting hip-hop's confrontational attitude front and center. As everything from "For Better or Worse" to "Cathy" to "Peanuts" remains sanitized in a homogenous, static universe of white middle class anxieties, there's something wickedly subversive about "The Boondocks."

Ten years ago, Public Enemy's Chuck D. complained that hip-hop could only get "in the mix, late at night," but here's "The Boondocks" at 8 a.m., poking fun at everything from buppies to Mariah Carey and telemarketers. If nothing else, the strip has forced people on both sides of the racial divide to register their beliefs and ideals with passion and commitment. Compared to the deafening silence of indifference, if McGruder and his motley crew of misfits bring the noise, it's clear people are listening.

--Oliver Wang is a staff person at ColorLines. This article is reprinted from its Winter 1999-2000 issue. For more information, visit their website: www.colorlines.com.

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