Withering Wit Has Listeners Captivated `Boondocks' Creator Addresses Yale Event
By SUSAN CAMPBELL, Courant Staff Writer
NEW HAVEN -- Standing at the front of an auditorium that looked like a castle dining hall, cartoonist Aaron McGruder, of "The Boondocks," leaned into the microphone and said, "All right. Yale."
And the packed house applauded, just like that. Through the rest of his nearly two-hour talk on Saturday, McGruder, a 28-year old who looks no older than his college audience, drew guffaws, groans, and loud applause at Yale University's eighth annual Black Solidarity Conference.
He didn't pander. He attacked sacred cows - attacked, butchered, and served up rappers who should talk about what they know - accountants and lawyers, black politicians whom he called worthless, and black corporate titans who still don't get to sit at the big table.
And, just to get the ball rolling, McGruder said: "There's a tremendous lack of honesty and truth and sincerity in all forms of public discussion," he said. "Everyone is basically lying to you. It's not that everything I say is true, but at least I think it is."
Influenced by filmmaker Michael Moore; cartoonists Berke Breathed, Bill Watterson and Garry Trudeau; and Japanese anime, "The Boondocks" centers on a group of African-American children removed from their inner-city Chicago home to survive in the (mostly white) suburbs. Through Huey, little brother Riley, Grandpa, Caesar and others, McGruder explores race, class and social structure.
McGruder said he approaches his strip, now in 250 newspapers, as if he'll lose it tomorrow.
"If I have got anything to say I better go ahead and say it now," he said. "This disregard for self-preservation pays off in huge benefits personally and professionally. If you stand up and say `This is terrible,' people will spend money for this."
In the wake of his strips post-Sept. 11, which questioned the country's support of the administration, the "`New York Daily News' banned my strip for a month and a half, and I got on `Nightline.' What are people afraid of?"
Through the strip's success, McGruder has met many prominent black Americans, including National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice ("She's a scary woman"); activists and sometime-presidential candidates Al Sharpton ("You are 56! Why do you have a perm?") and Jesse Jackson, whom he lambasted for Jackson's recent attack on the makers of the movie, "Barbershop." Jackson took umbrage at jokes about Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks.
"On the brink of conflict, Jesse Jackson wanted to talk about a movie," McGruder said. "And this is why nobody likes Jesse Jackson."
In the same breath, he lambasted the King family for selling the activist's image to be used in advertisements.
"They say, 'Martin Luther King didn't leave us a lot of money; we have to get by,'" McGruder said. "Get a job! Your grandfather dies and he doesn't leave you a lot of money. Are you going to prop up his corpse and charge admission?"
McGruder's comments were barbed enough that midway through a woman in the audience called out to remind him of something said by a conference speaker the day before. On Friday, award-winning poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez,encouraged her audience to go a week without saying something bad about anyone.
"What you don't know," said McGruder, as the audience cheered, "is that when she asked that, I didn't say nothing. I just sat there. I ain't going to tell Sonia to stop doing poetry for a week. This is my job."
He suggested activists who want change seek it effectively - with no picketing.
"We're going to march?" he said. "We're going to do what? Why?"
When McGruder, already 15 minutes over his time, tried to stop speaking, the audience cried for more, so he pronounced hip-hop - his choice of music since '83 - dead, and rap devoid of morals.
"The problem is, we have been in the era of gangsta rap for 11-12 years now," McGruder said. "Whole musical art forms have come and gone, and we haven't evolved past so many references to guns and shooting. We don't pay attention any more. We have become desensitized."
When he finished, the audience surged forward. While organizers of the weekend - Black Student Alliance at Yale - tried to move people out of the auditorium to the next event, McGruder told audience members to find him and ask questions later, that he would be around.
"I am for reparation," he said. "But not for picketing." And then he stepped away from the microphone.