10.19.2003
Black comedy
[Posted 11:57 PM by Stefan Beck]
Last week the Washington Post nixed six days of Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks,” a comic strip about a black child radical named Huey Freeman. The canceled strips dealt with a plan to find Condoleeza Rice a boyfriend: “Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleeza Rice truly loved, she wouldn’t be so hell-bent to destroy it.”
Predictably, the cancellation prompted squeals about “censorship.” The Post’s Executive Editor, Leonard Downie Jr., wasn’t impressed: “The Boondocks strips in question commented on the private life of the national security adviser…in ways that violated our standards for taste, fairness and invasion of privacy.” But in today’s Post, Ombudsman Michael Getler misses the point entirely:
I also found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire…The “Boondocks” characters, and their creator, were being mischievous and irreverent…and that seems okay to me.
Are these cracks about malt liquor and Trent Lott really satire? Doonesbury may be unfunny, yet Boondocks betrays a more sinister side of liberalism in belittling our Republican National Security Advisor; racialism–and the thinly veiled accusations of Uncle Tomism–tells us what ’tolerance’ really means to the Left. The Post should be applauded for holding fast to a standard that other papers jettisoned long ago.