Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Heated Debate Over Spiking of 'Boondocks' Strips"

Greg Mitchell

NEW YORK — The decision by several newspapers, including a few major ones, to drop Aaron McGruder's popular "Boondocks" comic strip this week has set off sparks, possibly as the artist intended.

The series of daily strips this week imagines a new reality TV show hosted by rap impressario Russell Simmons, called "Can a N***a Get a Job?", with the missing letters pretty easy to discern. It includes panels showing a woman who would rather sleep than apply for a job, a knife fight between two women and a black man smoking marijuana in a board room, in a takeoff on "The Apprentice."Among the papers refusing to run the strip this week are The Washington Post, New York Daily News and Newsday. The Daily News published notices reading, "Boondocks is on vacation and will return on September 27."

A humor columnist for The Washington Post blasted that paper's "pathetically weak and wrong decision" on the comic.

Universal Press Syndicate gave papers a choice of running the strip with the three symbols in the middle of the "N" word, or with symbols for all five letters in the word, or re-running an old strip. The most severely edited version also deletes the knives from the knife fight. This is the version carried by the Los Angeles Times.

Kathie Kerr, director of communications at Universal Press Syndicate, told E&P that at least four papers killed this week's strip entirely. She said that McGruder had not commented, adding that he is "kind of his own wild child" and that this is "not the first time" the "N" word had been used in the strip.

Greg Melvin, associate editor at Universal, called the content "defensible because it's really trenchant satire," in an interview with a St. Petersburg Times reporter.

The Sacramento Bee, which is running the strip unedited, reported Thursday that it had received 70 emails from readers, who backed the decision by a 7-1 margin. (On Monday, when the series started, the paper ran a story asking readers to share their thoughts.) Sentiments ranged from accusing McGruder of being "too young to understand" the severe pain the "N" word causes to praising its use in the strip as a way to "let go of the past."

The St. Petersburg Times, which also ran the unedited strips, considered pulling them, but Executive Editor Neil Brown explained in an email statement that he was "extremely reluctant to censor an artist just because the work is provocative."

Eric Deggans, editorial writer/columnist for that that paper, pointed out that coming from a white artist "this kind of material would probably earn the creator a swift dismissal."

Then he took a poll of "black people" in his local barbershop. He found that most loved the concept of the cartoon but when they actually looked at the strips some found it "too much." One customer said, referring to stereotypes in the cartoon, "You poke fun at that kind of stuff, and it becomes acceptable."

Meanwhile, Gene Weingarten, who writes a humor column every Sunday in The Washington Post Magazine, revealed in an online chat at the paper's Web site that when he asked permission to link to the "censored" Boondocks, which is easily available at the Universal Web site, it was "denied." He said the paper "has decided that it is inappropriate to disseminate the material in any way."

Since the Post, he said, is "never in any way condescending to its readers," surely one might think the strips must compare Hitler to Jesus, or even worse. But no, they "simply make fun of black exploitation TV and reality shows by taking them to a ridiculous extreme." After calling his paper the best in the country, he added, "But man, we can sometimes be enormous, big-shoes-flapping-red-nose-honking bozos."

Later, when a black man told him in the chat that he thought Boondocks was "hilarious this week," Weingarten replied: "We made a pathetically weak and wrong decision."

(Research assistance by Erin Olson.)

[Greg Mitchell) is editor of Editor & Publisher magazine.]