No American minority group has been caricatured as often and in as many ways as blacks.

The entertainment media, from Vaudeville to television, has portrayed blacks as happy-go-lucky idiots, dangerous thugs, and worse. The industry has degraded the black community for years, simply to make a buck.

Boondocks, the animated TV series, is the latest example of this imprudence.

With its frequent use of the n-word, the show is a ventriloquist for, and continues to perpetuate, the same old stereotypes of blacks.

Carter G. Woodson, the African American historian, once said: “When you control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions.” The American system took this philosophy to heart, creating a racial hierarchy with whites on top and blacks at the bottom.

That hierarchy was fortified by an ideology that justified the use of deceit, manipulation, coercion, terror and violence to control blacks. Keeping blacks in their “place” often meant categorizing them as inferior sub-humans – in other words, n**gers.

Today, blacks no longer require this inauspicious reminder. We maintain this inferior position by continuing to develop tools and strategies that perpetuate adherence to the centuries-old racial hierarchy.

Viewers of Boondocks may bellow with laughter at the characters and the manner in which the n-word is used, but all the while, they are being undermined by the subliminal forces of the word and are continuing to carry out the 400-year-old plight against blacks.

Moreover, some support a false dichotomy between blacks or African Americans, who are classified as respectable folks, versus n**gers, who are considered the disrespectful, impoverished black people. Understand, irrespective of behavior, income, ambition, clothing, ability, morals, or skin tone, no black person should be called or thought of as a n**ger.

No matter how the term is sliced, diced, or served up, once the smoke clears, the mission of this word is still intact. Although every race has it upper, middle and lower class, referring to someone as a n**ger -- an insult so morally offensive -- is unacceptable.

Language has been and is an effective means to marginalize minorities, and the n-word was and remains a shorthand way of effective mind control. Boondocks’ vile, wicked and immoral use of the n-word is a sellout to all African Americans who were truly victimized by its use.

Black America’s failure to hold Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder accountable shows an inability to rise above an 18th century mind state.

Many believe that when blacks use the term, there is no power or harm in it. But if the producer of Boondocks were white, all of black America would be up in arms.

The fact that McGruder is black does not give him license to degrade and demean black America. The n-word will always be a term of scorn and ridicule, regardless of who unwisely uses it.
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H. Lewis Smith is founder and president of UVCC, the United Voices for a Common Cause, Inc., www.theunitedvoices.com, and author of “Bury that Sucka: A Scandalous Love Affair with the N-Word.”

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