Columnist Ruth-Miriam Garnett
Aaron Magruder’s marvelously riveting television cartoon Boondocks is back, showcasing wannabe gangster Riley Freeman, alongside big brother Huey’s wannabe revolutionary ideologue and grandfather Robert’s gruff inanity.
The children act out following the family’s move to an affluent, predominately white suburb. I hope to see repeated a searing 2006 episode, “Gangstalicious Insurrection.”
“Gangstalicious” raises seriocomic questions of thug life homoeroticism. Think young black males grappling with fragile masculinity and precarious futures, a legitimate quest shunted by equal parts self-deification, misogyny and hyper-aggressive responses to social ostracism.
The episode conveys the gangsta ethos without women, intentionally it seems. Riley, irresistibly drawn to channeling his rage, chooses between warring rap icons. Absent pornographic frills, we witness his profound nihilism without distraction.
Make no mistake: We require that African-American children hate themselves as an adaptive mechanism, a lesson they learn and retain well. “That’s the cold read,” scholar/pastor Eugene Rivers would say. Well, identity is purpose.
Boondocks is culture-specific to a fault, yet analogies with the dominant culture are inescapable. The catharsis rap offers young whites is vicarious and expedient, rebellion entirely without risk. However, the ultimate tragedy for young black males might be a T-shirt slogan: “I hate my reflection; thus, I desire to kill it.” Well, identity is purpose.
For Riley, thug life is cult of choice. However, our little man’s identification with the gangsta tribe does not spare him its opacity. In “Gangstalicious,” he is clueless about the subplot of “Brokeback” hip-hop love until he becomes an eyewitness to it.
His shock in no way curtails his affinity, and not because he is empathetic. He is too invested in his apparent reality. The untidiness of the scenario as it unfolds is, for him, irrelevant. Well, identity is purpose.
Black male role definition is our most critical mandate, its urgency eclipsed only by the prospect of non-survival, due to marginalization, cultural erosion and other not yet unraveled forces against us.
Margaret Walker peeked this in her seminal 1942 poem, “For My People”: Let a race of men now rise and take control. Our men are the primary target in our community’s destabilization and dispersal, via 30 years of unemployment, narcotics, prison warehousing and a Trojan horse fraternization with homegrown sociopaths and foreign cartels perfectly willing to enslave generations of vulnerable youth.
Magruder’s genius is that he goes there, his resoundingly courageous advocacy detailing the need for principled, disciplined, visionary warriors – even ones as obdurate as Huey – not criminals.
James Baldwin wrote: If they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you at night. The outcomes of failing to make bold commitments to our youth are unthinkable. We simply cannot fail. And we must cultivate in them a nobility that is genderless. Victims cannot support victims.
Ruth-Miriam Garnett is a poet, novelist and essayist.