Ethnorotica.com

The Boondocks

19 February 06

If you get to bed at a reasonable hour you can be forgiven for missing the quiet revolution happening on late-night cable. Starting at 11pm and continuing well into the wee hours of the morning, the ordinarily kid-friendly Cartoon Network is stormed by the raunchy, potty-mouthed geniuses behind the Adult Swim programming block. Featuring a mashup of absurdist fare like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab, reruns of long-standing favorites like Futurama and Family Guy, as well as recent Anime hits like Ghost in the Shell, Adult Swim is aimed squarely at the post-South Park generation—a generation that accepts animated programming as a medium for decidedly adult entertainment.

The highlight of the most recent season has been the addition of The Boondocks, a small-screen adaptation of Aaron McGruder’s controversial comic strip. Not surprisingly, The Boondocks was considered too controversial even for Fox—McGruder’s biting commentary on racial politics in America and frequent use of the nigga-bomb ensured that no mainstream network would touch his project. Thankfully, the folks at Adult Swim are no strangers to pushing the envelope of Standards and Practices (something they frequently poke fun at in their own shows), and so we have a show that imagines George Dubya Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as white gangsta thugs (hearing Samuel L. Jackson, who voices the Rummi character, say “the absensce of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence” is alone worth the entire season); a show that awakens Martin Luther King, Jr. from a decades-long coma only to find himself alienated by nigga culture. The Boondocks manages to tip over all our sacred cows at once.

Hey, any series that pisses off Al Sharpton can’t be all bad, right?

One of my favorite episodes so far involves Granddad dating Cristal, a (very hot) prostitute, and of course he’s in such complete denial about her line of work that the boys take it upon themselves to prove she’s up to no good. A shopping montage includes Kayne ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ West’s now-infamous track concerning the varieties and vicissitudes of gold-diggers. There’s a funny sequence at the end when Cristal’s pimp comes to retrieve her and Granddad can’t get the pimp’s name right (“No, it’s ‘A Pimp Named Slickback.’ Like ‘A Tribe Called Quest’; you say the whole thing: ‘A Pimp Named Slickback!’”).

For anyone who’s not totally clear on this, Cristal is supposed to be biracial, a bit of a takeoff on the racially nebulous Mariah Carey. It seems to me that McGruder is offering some subtle, pointed commentary about the sexual politics of skin color in the black community, where, in eerie echoes of slavery-era house nigger favoritism, lighter-skinned black women are portrayed as more desireable by white and black society alike.

More: Television, Black, Anime, Stereotypes, The Boondocks, Aaron McGruder