The Boondocks follows the story of Huey Freeman, his brother Riley and grandfather Grandad. Huey, is ten years old but militantly Afro-centric, staunchly pro-Black, and extremely critical of black pop culture. The show began was a nationally syndicated comic strip by cartoonist Aaron McGruder before becoming a popular cartoon series on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.
As a black television show The Boondocks accomplishes something few other black television shows have been able to get away with. Its a social critique on black culture and its not usually a favorable one. McGruder has found a clever way to chide black people without seeming preachy, turning them off or seeming like he's pandering to whites. The show is able to do this because it uses humor and honesty to call out black people on some of our ridiculousness and ignorance. McGruder has made it cool to question the things we've been conditioned to believe represent black culture. It's hip, edgy and hilarious, and as a result has created a cult following and lots of controversy.
The show has taken on self-hating blacks via his character Uncle Ruckus. He shamed the race for their support of R.Kelly during his child molestation trial and he even brought back Dr. Martin Luther King from the dead to scold blacks for their lack of progress despite all the work he'd done to move them forward. He even made fun of our love of chicken.
One of the show's frequent targets is hip hop culture. Two fictional rappers, Gangstalicious and Thugnificent, were the source of two separate episodes. The Gangstalicious episode called gangster rappers out for using exaggerated masculinity to hide their homosexuality. In the Thugnificent episode there's a beef between the rapper and Grandad. Thugnificent goes on to release a popular dis record called "Eff Grandad" after the two get neighbors get into a spat over loud music. The show was mocking how asinine rap rivalries can be.
It's obvious McGruder loves the genre (just listen to the show's theme song), but he has some issues with it. This was evidenced most notably when the show targeted BET, or as he called it Black Evil Television. This resonated with me because I boycotted the network for years. I refused to watch BET or promote its platform until just recently. And even now I watch on a very limited basis There's a line in Tricia Rose's piece: "A Style No One Can Deal with," where she says "as an alternative means of status formation, hip hop style forges local identities for teenagers who understand their limited access to traditional access to social status attainment."That's BET is problematic for me.
If you want to crown yourselves the network of blacks you need to offer more representations of us than Moet-drinking, weed-smoking, materialistic, hypersexed creatures. As a black woman the constant image of my sisters dressed in thongs and bent over rented Bentleys became too much for me. Especially since it was one of the few images of black women being presented on the network. Tricia Rose speaks to authenticity, but what's more authentic is the idea that we are not just one thing we're multi-faceted. I'm sure some of us smoke weed and dance on cars in thongs, but most of us don't. BET lacked the balance. It subconsciously created a generation of youth raised to believe the route to status, money, and big-bootied girls is through rap music or the drug game. This was a problem for me
Apparently it was a problem for Aaron McGruder too:
The Boondocks is referencing an episode of the show he created where the heads of BET were depicted as Dr. Evil and No. 2 and their mission was the destruction of the black race. For reasons never really discussed the episode was banned and never aired. I looked for an episode of the show to include for this post, but could only find small clips. Its unfortunate, because I know a lot of people who could probably benefit from seeing it.
Oh well, in the words of Huey Freeman, "I guess I can dream, right."
Click here for a clip of the video "Eff Grandad" by Thugnificent and Lethal Interjection.
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