The Boondocks: Iconic Black Cartoon against blackface media

Growing up in the early 2000’s as a black child who went to public school there were a good few shows that gave black people some representation but, as a youth I wanted to participate in a good old fashioned cartoon. The cartoon world for black characters was (and still is) a fairly barren wasteland where black hopes and dreams go to die. Adult Swim being the afterhour version of Cartoon Network was a popular place for children to watch shows and look for humor. The only real black character was named Cleveland Brown on Family Guy. Cleveland was and still is voice by a white man and although this piece isn’t talking about that form of blackface I do want to bring up that the Cleveland Show only has two black voice actors and is written by white men. This tells us that white people were giving blacks our cartoon representation. The Boondocks changed that for us. Created by Aaron McGruder as a comic strip in 1996 and premiered on The Source a popular hip-hop magazine after receiving to much backlash for it’s takes on political leaders.(you can read all the strips here) the cartoons did their job in both calling out white bigotry and allowing the black community to pick fun at ourselves. For lack of better words this show is ICONIC (we do no count the 4th season though it is better than the racist, sexist, and homophobic running history of Family Guy and any other Seth MacFarlane production). Let's start from the very first scene of the very first episode:

In this breathtaking and hilarious opening scene we see the 10 year old Huey Freeman (the namesake of Huey Newton co-founder of the Black Panther Party) doing the one thing his grandfather Robert Freeman tell him never to do. Tell white people the truth. Huey proudly and unapologetically proclaims three black mundane facts that are controversial for most whites “Jesus was black. Ronald Reagan was the devil. The government is lying about 9/11” (no matter how you feel about the last of his statement we can not forget that our government funded Al Qaeda and they lied about it). Huey was a 10 year old black male who was looking to free and liberate the black community from the confines of the white minds through giving full truth no matter how militant it was and what friends he had to lose doing it. Huey Freeman gave young black people a look into someone we had never seen before from the cartoon we were given. A free thinker.

The show also did a wonderful job on talking about self hate within the black community with another unforgettable character name Uncle Ruckus who is a wonderful take on the black stereotype of a “Buck”. Rukus is the most dark skinned and least well spoken character on the entire show but, at the same time he has more hate for his black counterparts than almost any white person in the entire running history of the show. He even believes that he has a disease called “re-vitiligo” which turns you blacker. Rukus’ coonery wasn’t left as just a joke though. When Rukus speaks on history we see where his hatred comes from. He has no real information of black people in America. Here is what Rukus believed slavery was:

Rukus is the epitome of a nigga without a cause. He was completely brainwashed by the white man and gave a very funny (for black people) portrayal of what happens when you don’t know you own history.

(The Catcher Freeman episode also was ripped off by a white fave Quentin Tarantino and turned into Django: Unchained where Tarantino felt he could have every white under the sun say nigger.)

This show hit on big topics in black culture. The trail of R. Kelly. The impact of hurricane Katrina. Homophobia (not well enough but, Huey was never overtly homophobic so I took that as a win. The biggest yet was the black president we never thought we would have. Boondocks gave looks into American history from a black perspective and loved making black viewers question the world we lived it. It never missed a beat calling out the political leader who put crack in our communities and brought down the Panthers but, also called us out for some of our nonsense like rooting for R. Kelly even though yall knew he peed on that little girl:

And a nice read about Tyler Perry and his only storyline:

Now I didn’t want to type for two months straight so I didn't talk about the episode where Martin Luther King Jr. was actually in a coma or even the prison industrial complex episodes so I will just hope that the few things I did mention wet your pallet enough for you to look into the show (which is available on hulu plus and streamable here but don't tell anyone i told you that.)

All in all we need to stop sleeping on this amazing cartoon because it gave a voice to the black community in a media form where we were only portrayed by a white man in blackface who has no right to pick at the stereotypes that he portrays. Thank you Boondocks for showing us different factions of the black community and picking fun at all the black stereotypes set up by white america through the eyes of a young revolutionary and his hood intellectual little brother.