Aaron McGruder and “The Package”

By Nicholas Stix

February 12, 2002
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer

Many white folks like to kid themselves that the problem with race relations is black demagogues like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who supposedly lead black folks astray. That is a comforting thought, but if it were true, it would mean that most black folks are mental defectives.

I expect to hear the demagogue theory repeated quite a bit in the days to come, due to the February 10 installment of The Boondocks, an Afrocentric cartoon strip by Aaron McGruder. White folks—and not a few black folks—like to joke, “What are you going to do with a degree in black studies?” Well, Aaron McGruder got his college degree in black studies.

In the strip in question, two black children are talking on the telephone. One says, “I keep getting this forwarded e-mail saying that the Voting Rights Act will expire in 2007, and black people won’t be able to vote anymore. Is that true?” The second child responds, “That’s ridiculous. The Voting Rights Act was a means to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which is what actually gives black people the right to vote.” First Child: “Oh. So, when does the 15th Amendment expire?” Second Child: “That expired November 7, 2000.”

In confusing the purpose of the Voting Rights Act, and lying about the 2000 presidential election, McGruder managed to kill two birds with one stone. I suppose he saw that dishonest strip as part of his contribution to Black History Month. Then again, for Aaron McGruder, every month is Black History Month.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was enacted in 1965, in order to combat the massive disenfranchisement of black voters in the South through poll taxes, selectively enforced literacy tests, threats and violence. For many years, however, the federal courts misrepresented the VRA, twisting its application beyond recognition. Based on the racist, unconstitutional notion that blacks must live in black-only districts, and be represented only by blacks, oddly-shaped patches of land were racially gerrymandered into congressional districts that joined distant people with no geographical bond. The Supreme Court has since struck down such gerrymandering. Many blacks, however, including Aaron McGruder, cling to the notion that it is racist for the feds NOT to engage in racism on behalf of blacks.

As for Florida, all of the claims that white authorities disenfranchised blacks have been discredited. Gore campaign manager, Donna Brazille, notwithstanding, no white police used “guns and dogs” to keep blacks from voting. And despite Jesse Jackson’s claims to the contrary, the one police roadblock for automobile registration checks was not near a voting site, and did not intimidate a single black voter out of exercising the franchise. Nor was it true that poor, black neighborhoods were saddled with malfunctioning keypunch voting machines, while wealthy, white neighborhoods had superior optical scanners. Indeed, when the chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “historian” Mary Frances Berry, held hearings in January, 2001, seeking to perpetuate the Florida Hoax, not one person testified that he had been disenfranchised, or had witnessed anyone else being disenfranchised.

I have not met any black folks who would admit that the disenfranchisement charges have been disproved. Have they studied the matter? No; they “don’t have to!” White folks usually avoid such discussions. Even many hard-core, white racists will suck up to blacks, agreeing with them on charges of racism that the whites laugh about in private.

And “progressive” whites are hardly different. Back in 1988, at the height of the Tawana Brawley Hoax, a white socialist political operative said to me, “You can’t expect blacks to participate as equals in public discourse.” Had the woman made the same statement on her job, working for black socialist Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, she would have had to find a new profession. And that was many hoaxes ago.

The Florida Disenfranchisement Myth goes deeper than Florida, and has nothing to do with issues of truth or falsity.

The Florida Myth is part of what I call The Package. The Package is a bundle of Big Lies, all of which insist on the reality of black victimization: the Texaco, black church arson, racial profiling and Adam’s Mark Hotel hoaxes (in many quarters, the Tawana Brawley hoax, too); the necessity for affirmative action; charges of rampant, white-on-black police brutality; and blaming racism as the cause of black kids’ failure in school and black males’ increasing troubles with the law. In New York, where I live, any white who fails to defer to any black on any aspect of The Package, is automatically labeled a racist, and consequently, in big trouble.

(Does that mean that no blacks are ever victimized by whites? Of course not. But those blacks who truly are victims of racism, don’t get TV face time with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or legal help from the NAACP. And the blacks who get such help almost always turn out to be frauds. The only high-profile case that occurs to me that contradicts this scenario, is that of Abner Louima, whom NYPD officer Justin Volpe sodomized with a broom handle in 1997. Volpe is currently serving a thirty-year prison sentence.)

Black expectations of white deference are not limited to race hoaxes. Beginning in August, 1997, while teaching college, I moonlighted as a security guard at Toys’R’Us stores in New York City. My first day at a store in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, I introduced myself over lunch to a 20-something, American black bicycle mechanic named Eddie. At some point in the conversation, Eddie suddenly got up from the table, stood a few feet away from me, and never spoke to me again. I have no idea what I said, but I know I hadn’t made a bold statement on a hot button issue.

Ultimately, The Package includes anything that any black sees fit to include in it, at any given moment.

I used to work in New York as a caseworker for foster children who had been abused and neglected by their natural (aka “bio”) parents. Almost all of my foster children and foster parents were black (most foster agencies refuse to place black children in white foster homes, even if there are no black homes available). A black American woman named Donna, about thirty years of age, worked a few feet away from my unit, in the Family Day Care department. We saw each other constantly, and developed a cordial relationship, while investigating, and ultimately terminating, a crooked family day-care provider who was also one of my foster parents. (The woman was my one Hispanic foster parent.)

One day, when I complained to Donna about one of my “church ladies,” she accused me of racism.

“Church lady” was not a racially inflammatory or ambiguous term. It referred rather to certain devoutly Christian, black foster mothers who were notorious for lying to the agency, breaking state laws, and thwarting case workers. For instance, although state law forbade foster parents from ever hitting foster children, church ladies all beat their foster kids. If you developed good rapport with a foster mother, and dug a little, you could sometimes get her to admit it. (One foster mother practically dared me to shut down her home, bragging, “You got to hit the children!,” but she was unique.) Friends and relatives comprised church lady foster parent networks, training each other to repeat, Stepford Wife-like, the same refrain: “I never beat the children; I only take away privileges.”

I could have defended myself to Donna, but why permit myself to be put on the defensive?

The truth has little to do with most accusations of racism. The point is to constantly bully whites, and make them squirm, defend themselves, apologize and beg for forgiveness. And then, often as not, blacks get the white in question fired. It’s all about power.

I told Donna, “Don’t you dare pull that. And don’t talk to me anymore.”

My Chinese-American supervisor had already told me, regarding problems I’d had with an incompetent, black supremacist supervisor (who was fired), “The only reason you’re still working here, is because this agency is run by white males.” And she was telling the truth!

At the agency where I had previously worked, black workers would threaten whites, “I’ll kick your white ass,” right in front of the director, without suffering any repercussions. The director, a white woman of Irish descent, would play deaf.

Note that the above stories are from the good old days of the late 1980s!

During the same period, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Timothy Garton Ash reported, in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, that in the Soviet East Bloc, there was a division between “public” and “private” opinion. “Public opinion” referred to Communist Party propaganda; “private opinion” referred to the truths people talked about away from the prying ears of party officials and informers.

That America is not a dictatorship, makes it all the more incredible, that it should have the same split. “Public opinion” in America refers to the fairy tale, according to which blacks constantly suffer from white racism. “Private opinion” refers to the truth that whites and other non-blacks share among themselves: That American-born blacks are the single most racist group in America.

While there are exceptions to The Package, they are just that, and they are increasingly rare. While economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are two black men who are arguably the most trenchant critics of The Package, in black America, they are two very lonely men. Old men, too, for whom no successors are in sight.

During the early 1960s, Martin Luther King reportedly said that, because of the threat posed by racial separatist Malcolm X, whites were forced to deal with King. Today, blacks’ refusal—aided by white elites—to permit honesty to play any role in talk about race, is making white separatism look more legitimate by the day for unsophisticated young whites who see no reason for playing the private-public game. At the rate things are going, blacks may someday need to pray that white Martins will arise to offer an alternative to the white Malcolms that will prove to be the surprise inside The Package.