Home > Profile of Aaron McGruder from the New Yorker
THE RADICAL: Why do editors keep throwing
"The Boondocks" off the funnies page?
by BEN McGRATH
The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-04-19 and 26
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Posted 2004-04-12
On the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture, last December,
the left-leaning political weekly The Nation celebrated
its hundred-and-thirty-eighth birthday. It was a Sunday
night, and the weather was dreadful—forbiddingly cold
and wet, heavy snow giving way to sleet—but three
hundred people could not be deterred from dropping five
hundred dollars a plate for roast chicken amid the
marble-and-velvet splendor of the Metropolitan Club, on
Fifth Avenue. Jean Stein, a veteran of the liberal
party circuit and the mother of Katrina vanden Heuvel,
The Nation’s editor, was there, as were E. L. Doctorow,
John Waters, Charlie Rose, and even John McEnroe.
Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, was
an honored guest; Amtrak had been advised of his
itinerary, and, despite service delays all weekend, the
train got him there on time. Joseph Wilson, the former
Ambassador to Gabon, riding a wave of liberal good will
since the politically motivated outing of his wife, the
C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, attended as well, by
special invitation.
Byrd spoke first, and he delivered a generous helping
of full-throated Southern oratory. Yes, it was good to
see Saddam gone, Byrd said, but he was ever more
convinced, what with a "swashbuckling, ’High Noon’"
kind of President in office, that Iraq was the wrong
war at the wrong time. "Thank God for courageous
institutions like this one," he said, "which are
willing to stand up to the tide of popular convention."
He recited the closing lines of Tennyson’s "Ulysses,"
and then, finishing up, invoked "the spirit of
Longfellow." Standing ovation.
Toward the dessert (chocolate torte) portion of the
evening, Uma Thurman rose to introduce a special guest:
Aaron McGruder, the creator of the popular and
subversive comic strip "The Boondocks," who, as it
happens, had travelled farther than anyone else to be
there, all the way from Los Angeles. McGruder, one of
only a few prominent African-American cartoonists, had
been making waves in all the right ways, poking
conspicuous fun at Trent Lott, the N.R.A., the war
effort. An exhibition of his comic strips—characters
with Afros and dreadlocks drawn in a style borrowing
heavily from Japanese manga,with accentuatedforeheads
and eyes—was on display in the Metropolitan Club’s
Great Hall. It seemed to be, as a Nation contributor
said later, "his coronation as our kind of guy."
But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his
approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces.
What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who
rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this,
began by thanking Thurman, "the most ass-kicking woman
in America." Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-
nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to
such functions all the time, so you could imagine how
bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable
length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of
"militant cynicism," with a recurring theme: that the
folks in the room ("courageous"? Please) were a sorry
lot.
He told the guests that he’d called Condoleezza Rice,
the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her
face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange
occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where
McGruder was given the Chairman’s Award; Rice requested
that he write her into his strip.) He recounted a lunch
meeting with Fidel Castro. (He had been invited to Cuba
by the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is one
of the few politicians McGruder has praised in "The
Boondocks.") He said that noble failure was not
acceptable. But the last straw came when he "dropped
the N-word," as one amused observer recalled. He said—
bragged, even—that he’d voted for Nader in 2000. At
that point, according to Hamilton Fish, the host of the
party, "it got interactive."
Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, was sitting
in the back of the room, next to Joe Wilson, the
Ambassador. He shouted out, "Thanks for Bush!" Exactly
what happened next is unclear. Alterman recalls that
McGruder responded by grabbing his crotch and saying,
"Try these nuts." Jack Newfield, the longtime Village
Voice writer, says that McGruder simply dared Alterman
to remove him from the podium. When asked about this
incident later, McGruder said, "I ain’t no punk. I
ain’t gonna let someone shout and not go back at him."
Alterman walked out. "I turned to Joe and said, ’I
can’t listen to this crap anymore,’" he remembers. "I
went out into the Metropolitan Club lobby—it’s a nice
lobby—and I worked on my manuscript."
Newfield joined in the heckling, as did Stephen Cohen,
a historian and the husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel.
"It was like watching LeRoi Jones try to Mau-Mau a
guilty white liberal in the sixties," Newfield says.
"It was out of a time warp. Who is he to insult people
who have been putting their careers and lives on the
line for equal rights since before he was born?"
By the time McGruder had finished, and a tipsy Joe
Wilson took the microphone to deliver his New Year’s
Resolutions, perhaps half the guests had excused
themselves to join Alterman in the lobby. A Nation
contributor estimated that McGruder had offended eighty
per cent of the audience. "Some people still haven’t
recovered," he said, sounding thrilled.
"At a certain point, I just got the uncomfortable
feeling that this was a bunch of people who were
feeling a little too good about themselves," McGruder
said afterward. "These are the big, rich white leftists
who are going to carry the fight to George Bush, and
the best they can do is blame Nader?"
He went on, laughing a little, "I was not the right
guest for that event. I’ll be the first one to say
that. It was one of those reminders that, yeah, I’m not
this political leader that people are looking for."
As a talented young black man who is outspoken in his
political convictions, McGruder has grown accustomed to
inordinately high expectations. The Green Party called
him last year, asking if he might like to run for
President. He had to point out that he wasn’t old
enough. "I want to do stuff that has a moral center—
stuff that I can be proud of," he continued. "But I’m
not trying to be that guy, the political voice of young
black America, because then you have to sort of be a
responsible grownup, for lack of a better word. And
it’s like—you know, Flip Wilson said this, he said, ’I
reserve the right to be a nigger.’ And I absolutely do,
at all times."
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