Boondocks TV

Well, The Boondocks has aired and already the old, tired debate has begun to be rehashed, over the shows' use of "the n-word."

The thing about the n-word is that you can't win: if you don't use it, like I don't, then you sound prissie and boogie and out of touch. And if you do you use it, then you are doing something indefensible. What did Marx say in "On the Jewish Question"? That one cannot expect political emancipation under conditions of structural inequality and oppression? The same thing applies to the n-word. We cannot resolve this political question without transforming the social context -- a context of structural and routinized anti-black racism. The n-word is a sign taken for a wonder.

Too bad this context is ignored in the debate, since this is the context which, by the way, The Boondocks is genius at diagnosing. I have not always been a huge fan of the strip -- a lot of times I felt McGruder was 'mau mauing' white liberals -- exploiting white guilt to rehearse endlessly a literally childish and impotent black anger in his Huey character. His strip, like many of Spike Lee's films, felt like a kitsch of politics, a melancholic and insufficient substitute for the real thing, a disabling and nostalgic backword look to the aesthetics and militancy of the 1970s.

But the first episode of the series changed my mind. Here, McGruder displays a complete awareness of how Huey's anger gets commodified and consumed by rich liberals, and achieves something I have never seen in an adult, ironic, hipster cartoon: an awareness and self-critique of its own mode of satire.