Aaron has gone to the well and too the wall, and considering what I just read from Bomani, it seems as if he's gone as far as he can go.
But after watching him channel Dr. Martin Luther King for the purpose of calling folks a bunch of niggaz, I have to reconsider that and seriously reconsider the cartoon. Between this and the "nigga moment" premise--one that delineated the difference between black folks and niggaz, something I absolutely refuse to stand for--I might be done with Aaron's cartoon.
The premise of this week's Boondocks was that King lived and came out of a coma in 2000. After becoming a pariah by invoking a turn the other cheek attitude post-9/11, King finds himself lonely, confused and out of touch. So much so that Huey Freeman has to talk him into starting a black revolutionary party. The only people who show up to the inaugural are niggas and bitches who got tickets from urban contemporary radio station 'The Freak' KFRK. King calls them out and basically takes the Cosby rant up an order of magnitude. Then he moves to Canada. After which black America realizes it is actually trifling for not enjoining the Revolution; they stay in highschool now, revolt and blockade the White House. In 2020 Oprah is elected President.
As funny as this can be, you really can't call McGruder a political sophisticate of any depth. We already knew that. What we didn't quite realize over here in the Old School was how long McGruder must have suffered in the ghetto, because he's not seeing black people at all in his cartoon. He's only seeing niggas and bitches - the Fourty Percent, the loud minority. As a creative font, that's showing signs of desparation. The only one of these knuckleheads he has given any backstory to is the pop-eyed character who wanted to shoot King himself, but believed that the white man has better aim. The rest are anonymous, ignorant crowds. In other words, there are no niggas to love for any reason. McGruder's King isn't the only one who has been in a coma for 40 years.
It's really too bad that there's nobody in The Boondocks who is a young adult. It must be frustrating for young adults to watch. It must be frustrating to be the young adult McGruder is when any such portrayal is lacking in his artistic vehicle.
How I miss Kyle Baker.
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