Out In The Boondocks
by Vonetta Booker-Brown

Controversy. There’s that word again. And it makes Aaron McGruder one busy young brother. This is an observation, if you will—on the runaway success and buck-wild-yet-subtle humor of his comic strip, The Boondocks. On why some newspaper readers can’t get enough of the strip—and why The Boondocks works the last nerves of others just as much.

And The Boondocks—which satirically chronicles Huey and his younger brother, Riley as they cope with suburban life after being transplanted from Chicago’s South Side—is controversial as hell, also. From its start on a small urban website in 1996, to appearing at that year’s end in McGruder’s campus newspaper The Diamondback (University of Maryland), to a three-month 1998 stint in The Source, and finally onto newspaper pages across the nation, it seems to have struck the nerves of many with its blunt, sarcastic satire about the everyday race issues that are a bit subtler than cross burnings and the “N” word. Later for “We Are the World” and “Can’t we all just get along?”  Knowing half-smiles tend to appear on the lips of black readers when the little blond white girl tells a Boondocks character, the biracial Jazmine, that she thought her abundant, curly-kinky brown hair was the result of a “bad hair day.” Meanwhile, Huey’s younger brother, Riley, fancies that his last name is Escobar—a little fake thug who’ll reply, “Yours!” when asked what his "favorite whip of choice" is.

"Damn–that’s f***ed up," you might think—while laughing at the same time. Why? Because you know it’s real. And then again, Boondocks might get you heated for the exact same reason.  Or perhaps you just don’t get it. Whatever the case, it seems as though the middle ground is non-existent. 

“I suspect more complaints come from white readers, but we do hear negatives from some African-American readers who object to the hip-hop perspective, thinking it’s a negative stereotype,” says Lee Salem, executive at Universal Press Syndicate, which syndicates The Boondocks. Salem adds, “We also hear from many white readers, who claim to come from all ages and are from across the political spectrum, who love the strip.”  The strip’s launch was the largest in Universal Press Syndicate’s history, and according to Salem, 200 newspapers across the country carry The Boondocks—out of which there were three or four major cancellations of the strip. He noted that out of those, one came from Ohio and the rest were from the South.

Biloxi, Mississippi’s Sun-Herald is one publication that found The Boondocks a little too hard to swallow. When the newspaper decided to run the strip a few months ago, its mostly white, older readers weren’t having it, flooding the Sun-Herald’s offices with feedback about the strip—90-95 percent of it negative, according to executive director Mike Tonas. “Some of them thought it was reverse racism, and that if we had a cartoon or comic strip in which the white people were just as open about the race issue, we wouldn’t do it.  Others said it just wasn’t funny.”

That point of view is most likely nothing new to McGruder. Born in Chicago and raised in Columbia, Maryland, the 25-year-old dealt with the self-esteem battering reality of often being the only brown face among a sea of pink ones. And being that McGruder’s a card-carrying child of hip hop, it just might make sense that many people don’t really understand The Boondocks. Why? Because it’s a parallel to the cries of overblown politicians hollering about hip hop being the "downfall of society"—their words flying right over the fundamentals of its four elements: honest, creative expression that’s not watered down or afraid to give it to the masses raw and real. Then again, it could be that mainstream America’s so used to convincing itself that everything’s fine and dandy on the race front, its pale face recoils in ignorant shock when presented with a picture of things otherwise. And you know what? McGruder really doesn’t give a damn. "The focus of the strip is race," he explained in a recent Newsweek interview. "Just like the focus of 'Dilbert' is cubicles."

If you’re feeling where he’s coming from and you’re one of the ones who need their daily Boondocks fix, Daily News is the tri-state area’s pusher. Quite frankly, Daily News comics committee member Sam Poppa doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “It’s a good strip,” he simply replies when asked why the paper runs the comic. “There are times when some of us on the committee will say, ‘Whoa, he just went a little too far that time,’ but all in all, most of us like the comic.” Poppa says that there have been some dissenters, although not just about the race issue—some get ticked off at the “disrespectful” way Huey sometimes behaves towards adults, and many don’t dig what they consider to be Huey’s “it’s all about me” attitude.

People’s reactions to The Boondocks are based on a thing bigger than the strip, according to New Haven Register columnist Frank Harris, III. “People react to race in different ways.  As Americans, there remains a great deal of tension just talking about race, let alone laughing about it--particularly in mixed company or scenarios.  We still have a tremendous degree of racial discomfort with the everyday living of life,” says Harris, an assistant professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University who also teaches a course there called “Race and the News.”

He adds, “I don't think America and Americans have bridged the racial comfort gap where we can laugh at what some call racial humor.  The wounds old and new remain open for those who inflict by intent or accident, and those inflicted who have a hard time knowing or caring whether it was by intent or accident.” Well, to those who have difficulty dealing with The Boondocks in-your-face take on race, the strip's message is clear: Get over it, already.