Ohio Readers React to 'Boondocks'

By: E&P Staff It's no surprise when a topical comic elicits strong reader reaction with social or political satire. That's what a satirical strip is supposed to do. But this expected scenario also provides material for ombudsman columns.

Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal Public Editor Mike Needs wrote yesterday that about a dozen readers complained about the Christmas Day "Boondocks." In the strip -- which continued a sequence showing a black Santa -- cartoonist Aaron McGruder had the Santa say to two kids: "So what do you Negro hooligans want for Christmas? Rims? Gold fronts? Huh?" Huey leaves, muttering: "Okay, I think I've seen enough." After which, Santa adds: "How 'bout a job? No, you wouldn't want that, would you?"

One Beacon Journal reader called the Dec. 25 strip "disturbing, dehumanizing, and disrespectful." And the president of the NAACP's Akron branch said: "We're trying to bring people together. This is pulling people apart."

But others defended the Universal Press Syndicate comic. A Beacon Journal reader said McGruder is "your typical iconoclast, which is something every society -- and subsociety -- needs more of." And Beacon Journal Managing Editor Mike Burbach was quoted by Needs as saying that McGruder "skewer[s] stereotypes" and "jab[s] at whoever he thinks needs it."

Needs himself had mixed feelings. "Anything that gets people talking about race relations ... means progress," he wrote. "Despite that, I cringed when I read several of these 'black Santa' strips. If McGruder's intention was to make us uncomfortable, he succeeded. But racial slurs, even in this context, come perilously close to, perhaps even cross, that line that should not be crossed in a daily newspaper."