Aaron McGruder and Terry McMillan

The two just happened to be linked in my mind because of what I am currently reading. I just finished McMillian's The Interruption of Everything and McGruder has been in the news for running afoul of Al Sharpton.

Aaron McGruder is the creator of a comic strip called The Boondocks. A cartoon version of the strip airs on Comedy Central's Adult Swim. Aaron McGruder likes to use the word “nigger” in the cartoon version as often as he can get away with it, and passionately defends his right do to so.

In a recent episode, which ran on Martin Luther King Jr day, McGruder puts the word into the mouth of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King is provoked by the excess behavior of an audience of blacks into a speech liberally laced with the word.

Enter Al Sharpton. He is not happy with McGruder for putting inappropriate language into the mouth of Dr. King and wants McGruder to apologize. As Dwayne Wickham put it: “By having King make such flagrant public use of a word that his cartoon character describes as "the ugliest word in the English language," McGruder pushes the slain civil rights leader into the swamp of self-loathing speech”.

Wickham argues that McGruder would not write an episode in which Golda Meir returns from the dead and calls a group of Jews “kikes”. Probably not since McGruder's subjects are the black community and politics, not former Prime Ministers of Israel. His use of the word aptly reflects the amount of frustration that Dr. King would feel if he saw what is happening to his community.

Aaron McGruder remains unapologetic and maintains that people who get upset over the language are missing the point. King's rant was targeted at blacks who have failed to live up to his dream, and the use of risque language was to get people's attention.

Which leads me to Terry McMillan. In her latest novel, the main character, Marilyn Grimes, goes on a fantastic riff about the amazing utility of the word “fuck”. I happen to be a fan of the word myself, so Marilyn's riff on the word was fun to read.

In both of these cases McGruder and McMillan are putting into the mouths of their characters language that we are taught is inappropriate in polite company. Yet both of these words are used frequently, liberally, and in a number of different contexts in popular culture, some polite, some not so much.

I wanted to conclude this entry with a brilliant observation on the fluidity of language, but I'm having a difficult time finding the words. Words are not static beings, they evolve and change meaning over time, they are liquid, they rely not only on intent to make meaning, but the interpretation of the receiver.