Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Boondocks
Did you guys notice the difference in dialect between Granddad, Huey, and Riley and the New Orleaneans? You could hardly understand what Uncle Jericho and the rest of his family were saying, especially the oldest kid with the fro. It was interesting to see, because I am not black, therefore, I don't see the cultural differences between black people. There are definitely cultural differences that I see between white people, however, and that is one of my frames. My color and ethnicity determines what I see in people. In being exposed to just one example of the differences between two ethnicities other than my own, I am forced to broaden my horizons. For example, us white folk here in the North have preconceived notions about people in the South; that they are farmers and maybe not as intellectual as we are. The episode of the Boondocks we watched exposed us to the same type of difference that perhaps black people in the North have about black people from the South. It all comes down to frames. Each character represented a different frame people might view black people through: Riley was the stereotypical gangster; Huey was the activist; Granddad was the old curmudgeoney sarcastic black grandpa; Uncle Jericho was the laborer from the South; his mom was the Jesus-loving old black grandma. I feel like all these thoughts are just rushing around in my head and I can't figure out how to make them words...do you guys agree...or even get what I'm trying to say?
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Sorry, Tyler, I don't really agree. I think you're making huge generalizations about blacks and whites, and northerners and southerners for that matter. I think what is really essential about this cartoon is some of what we were talking about in class on Thursday - when does a tragedy become funny? 9/11 can't really be made funny as it was such an obvious attack on the nation as a whole, through destroying some buildings in our favorite city.
ReplyDeleteKatrina, on the other hand, can be satirized in this manner because the people it is making fun of are survivors, from a hurricane that was Mother Nature's doing. I agree that the cartoon depicts common black stereotypes within the Katrina victim's family, and that the reason we know they are stereotypes is due to the frames through which we are taught to see the world. However, I think these stereotypes are besides the issue, the main issue being that while we think of Katrina victims being these poor, helpless people, The Boondocks is trying to show us that thinking of them in that way is also a frame, and that maybe they aren't so sweet and innocent. (Grandpa's house is literally destroyed after their charge-free stay).
I don't know, this is why I didn't write about the Boondocks in my blog post, so I too could be completely off the mark. I just didn't think that the generalizations you were making in your post were entirely correct.
However, I am unsure whether all that I just said made any sense either, LOL.
I thought that Jericho's dialect was hard to understand because of the region. New Orleans has a very distinct type of accent that a bunch of Northerners probably don't hear very often, plus the fact that Jericho spoke very quickly and used a lot of regional slang.
ReplyDeleteBut what you said about Northerners having a certain idea about what people from the South are like seems pretty relevant to the episode itself. Like when Grandpa is saying that he wants to help the Katrina victims but then writes off his distant family members as crazy because they are from New Orleans. I think it's easy for us Yankees to write off what we consider to be southern fanatacism because we are up here on our fairly urban platforms looking down on people in the south, but in the rural south priorities shift away from education because (my opinion) the government has not enforced eduction as firmly as they do here. This leads them to shift their focus towards family and religion and away from career and higher education. Because of the huge gap in our value systems we two groups have a hard time understanding each other, thus the birth of the Jesus-loving grandma stereotype and the loving-but-lazy-patriarch stereotype.
That being said I don't think that the writers of the Boondocks episode created these characters as serious representives of either African American people or southern people but as exaggerations of the stereotypes we have created in order to enhance the comedy of the situation.
I'm glad you guys straightened me out...I really had no idea what I was trying to say when I was writing this. However, I stand beside what I said about generalizations because they do exist. They exist within even the smallest aspects of civilized life. I was just pointing out that it seemed like the show was highlighting those generalizations, and for me, that was what made the show funny.
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