Memoirs of a couch potato

Sunday is the only day I actually have time to sit down and watch television. At 8 p.m., I hop into my bed and turn to ABC for two hours of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy. After such dramas featuring a world I only know via television, I turn to Cartoon Network for my weekly dose of the Boondocks, Comedy Central’s answer to South Park.
In the Boondocks comic strip, Huey Freeman, the main character of the strip, and his best friend, Michael Caesar sit under a tree and discuss the year’s most embarrassing black people.
Hilarious.
As the years progressed, I purchased any Boondocks material I could obtain. The strip became so famous that the NAACP even interviewed the creator, Aaron McGruder for their magazine, The Crisis. So when it was announced that Boondocks would be debuting on Cartoon Network, I had the naïve hope that people would watch and be enlightened on politics as well as pop culture.
I was so wrong.
Other than a few like-minded Boondocks followers, the show received negative feedback. Most claimed that their overuse of the “N-word”, blatant stereotypes of the characters and the subject matters were not a positive portrayal of blacks or what “we” really say behind closed doors. And to think I was upset for Regina King being the voices of Huey and Riley.
In the first 15 minutes of the cartoon, Huey stands in front of an upper class, white audience and proclaims that former president Ronald Reagan was the devil and that Jesus Christ was black. I was floored. Just when I thought the show could not get any funnier, Uncle Ruckus, a black white supremacist, begins a rant on why white people are superior to blacks.
Each week, Boondocks pushes the envelope with its subject matter. The one episode that garnered a lot of attention was when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was featured saying the “N-word” to a crowd of socially unconscious black youth. In a matter of minutes, Rev. Al Sharpton was on CNN urging everyone to boycott the show.
If Dr. King were alive today and saw the state of the black youth, the last thing on his mind would be the “N-word”.
Despite some bad publicly, Boondocks and McGruder are enjoying the fruits of their labor. The show has been nominated for “Outstanding Comedy Series” by the 37th annual NAACP Image Awards. Cartoon Network has also ordered 20 more episodes of the show due to debut in the fall of this year. And I cannot be more elated.
It is about time a show tackles important black issues in a way that is relatable to the average person. Not everyone is going to take the time to read Cornell West’s “Race Matters,” but they’ll take the time to watch a cartoon where Charlie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson are doing the voices of two white boys who want to be black.
New episodes of the Boondocks come on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. on Cartoon Network (channel 33). Watch it. Learn something from it.