Uh-oh, The Boondocks has done it again, pushing hot buttons for some of you with inflammatory racial references.
It all started with the Dec. 18 comic strip, when the Uncle Ruckuscharacterbecomes a black Santa and immediately says to young Jazmine, “Your hair is nappier than a wolf’s butt in a windstorm!”
Later, the nasty and cynical Ruckus tells young Huey and Caesar to “just do drive-bys on each other and get it over with.” At one point, Ruckus says, “Santa hates black people — can’t say I blame ‘im.”
In the Christmas Day strip, Ruckus asks Huey and Caesar, “So what do you Negro hooligans want for Christmas? Rims? Gold Front? Huh?”
As you would expect, readers reacted.
“On Dec. 25, 2004, yes, Christmas Day, I read the most disturbing, dehumanizing and disrespectful comic, Boondocks,” wrote Melissa Frymyer of Mogadore. “I am appalled… that a local newspaper of such a diverse community would run such a comic and support the views or stated humor of this comic.”
Frymyer’s was one of about a dozen complaints generated by the current Boondocks story line.
“I have just read the single most obscene thing I have ever seen in your paper,” wrote Leonard Klein of Coventry Township, who described himself as 66, white, liberal leaning and “slow to censor.”
“If it was written by a white person, he or she would be tarred and feathered, rightfully so, and driven out of town. The fact that it was probably done by an African-American is, I think, even worse.”
Cheryl Williams of Akron said she and the 25 people she showed it to were offended and outraged. “This takes things back to the ’60s. Maybe you should have thought about it more before printing it.”
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“This was appalling. This one really went too far,” said Ophelia Averitt, president of the Akron branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “We’re trying to bring people together. This is pulling people apart.”
For those of you who don’t regularly visit The Boondocks in the daily comics pages, the strip features the pointed and prickly observations of African-American kids who move to white suburbia. It appears in about 400 newspapers.
Controversial. Provocative. Incendiary. Pick your adjective and it probably applies — including disrespectful, scornful and subversive.
The strip’s creator, Aaron McGruder, makes no apologies. The 30-year-old African-American uses little Huey Freeman, named after Black Panther Huey Newton, to poke and prod at all establishment, both white and black.
For his recent anthology book of early strips, McGruder chose the title, A Right to Be Hostile. That’s his ongoing theme.
Beacon Journal editors were quick to defend publishing The Boondocks, without endorsing or advocating the language or approach used in it.
“While some people have found McGruder’s tone and approach offensive during the past couple days,” said Editor Debra Adams Simmons, “he actually represents a diverse perspective not always found in mainstream newspapers.
“McGruder is a young African-American artist who attempts to provoke thought, improve racial discourse, expose and exploit stereotypes.”
Managing editor Mike Burbach noted Uncle Ruckus was introduced in the Dec. 18 strip by Huey as “a fat, old, self-hating black man.”
“It’s satire,” said Burbach. “Then, as he often does, the strip’s author goes on to skewer stereotypes and to jab at whoever he thinks needs it.”
Wendy Schweiger of Akron is one reader who thanks her “lucky stars that we’re still living in a country where Aaron McGruder can do this kind of thing and you’ll still print it.”
“I know he’s your typical iconoclast, which is something every society — and subsociety — needs more of,” she wrote last week. “He never says the politically correct thing.”
For me, anything that gets people talking about race relations — including The Boondocks — means progress.
Despite that, I cringed when I read several of these “black Santa” strips. If McGruder’s intention was to make us uncomfortable, he succeeded. But racial slurs, even in this context, come perilously close to, perhaps even cross, that line that should not be crossed in a daily newspaper.
Where is that line? What is proper? That’s the kind of thing discussed by the paper’s Readers Advisory Panel. In the monthly face-to-face conversations, the panel members share, the newspeople listen and explain, and everyone grows in their understanding.
I’m still looking for a bigger, more diverse pool of applicants for the 2005 RAP. If you are willing to spend two evening hours a month talking about the newspaper, send me a short note by Jan. 7.
Be prepared to discuss thorny issues like whether a newspaper offends its readers by printing things like The Boondocks.
Do you want to be heard? Here’s your chance.
