I will never embrace the N-word.
That’s why I have difficulty with the TV version of “The Boondocks” that just premiered on the Cartoon Network. As adapted from the in-your-face comic strip created by Aaron McGruder, the show uses the N-word quite vigorously.
Maybe this is a generational thing. I’m old school. But, heck, old school means that I not only know how to speak correct English but that I also know a bit about history. I have lived through times when white slingers of the N-word meant no endearment.
I embrace another N-word for endearment and disparagement. It’s “Negro.” That was always a word that was a step up from the one
that McGruder finds so comfortably trickling off his tongue.
When I use the word Negro, you know where you stand with me by inflection and where my hands are on my hips.
I have often defended McGruder’s comic strip, even when newspapers that carry it refuse to publish it because of its incendiary (they say) content – whether about Black Entertainment Television’s lack of blackness or Whitney Houston’s drug problems or the Bush administration post-9/11 or Condoleezza Rice’s love life. The strip offers three facets of the angry black man, with two preteen boys, Huey and Riley, living with their grandfather in a mostly white suburb that is nothing like their former neighborhood in Chicago.
I’ll keep an open mind about the television version. David Bianculli, the TV critic for the New York Daily News, is among those who liked its late-night debut. The show, as he sees it, “with all its knowingly controversial observations and language, is a sort of animated equivalent of ‘All in the Family.’ It’ll make you think, and maybe even wince – but at the same time, it makes you smile.”
Unless you’re wincing so much about that N-word.
“I think it makes the show sincere,” said McGruder in a recent online interview with Lee Bailey. “At a certain point, we all have to realize that sometimes we use bad language. And the N-word is used so commonly, by not only myself, but by a lot of people I know, that it feels fake to write around it and to avoid using it.”
Back in the day, that is to say, when I was a college student in Georgia, I thought it rather cool to hear the radical group, The Last Poets, precursors to today’s rappers, use music and the spoken word – even the N-word – to analyze, even sear, American society and values, and to pump up blacks with a sense of we-were-once-royalty-in-Africa. But I have evolved and have flushed that word from my historically sensitive brain.
McGruder claims that he has merely picked up the conversation begun in the days when the comedian and social critic Flip Wilson, in his own words, reserved the right to be a n–. “This is a country that celebrates Richard Pryor as a genius,” McGruder told The Associated Press,” and still we wonder if we should be using the word ‘nigga’ in entertainment. It’s a conversation that hasn’t gone anywhere in about 30 years.”
Wilson is dead. Pryor is incapacitated, but when he was still vigorous and razor sharp, he renounced the use of the N-word after a life-changing pilgrimage to Africa.
Good luck with your TV show, Aaron. But if you remain true to your pledge to bombard us with the N-word, I don’t think there is enough Botox in the world to keep me watching and wincing and still keeping it together. I’ll tune out.
Call it my generational privilege.