Fresh Air, Aaron McGruder, Sergey Brin and Jerry Page, and Remembering Dr. Shirley Glass by Terry Gross | Free Audiobook

**Terry Gross** (0:02)
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Aaron McGruder, writes and draws the syndicated comic strip The Boondocks. This year, Rolling Stone described him as one of the five young political cartoonists bringing the noise of dissent to America. The Boondocks has been controversial in some newspapers because McGruder takes on issues pertaining to race, politics, and pop culture. The strip is carried daily in 350 newspapers. McGruder is now working on a TV series and a movie based on his Boondocks characters. And he has a new collection of his strips called A Right to Be Hostile. The Boondocks is about two brothers who have moved with their grandfather from an inner city neighborhood to a largely white suburb. The older brother, Huey Freeman, named after the Black Panther Huey P. Newton, is something of a political and social critic even though he's still a pre-teener. His younger brother Riley wants to have the thug look like the rappers and action heroes he emulates, but he worries he might be too cute to look tough. McGruder is critical of pop culture's focus on the thug life. He thinks African American pop culture, rap in particular, has gotten stuck and has stopped evolving.

**Aaron McGruder** (1:13)
When gangsta rap started, there was more balance. In the early 90s, very late 80s, early 90s, when it first came out and got popular, there was a bunch of different type of hip-hop music that was out. And it's not that gangsta rap in and of itself is this horrible thing. It's just when you're inundated with it and kids are inundated with it, non-stop and there's really not a lot of alternatives that are presented to them, it becomes slightly problematic. Not just for the idea of content and what it's saying, as much as just the idea that we have really become...
Black people have sort of lost our creativity, which we're kind of known for and we basically pride ourselves for. That's basically gone away. And that to me is a greater concern than just the content issues and the violence and the misogyny and all that stuff.

**Terry Gross** (2:09)
Well, this is a theme that you kind of cover a lot in Boondocks. I mean, in one strip a character says, In the past ten years we've seen the near total disintegration of black political and social leadership. That means the single largest influence on black America's self-image is popular culture, music, TV and films. To ensure the ongoing mental enslavement of the black man, black TV and films must remain racially degrading, intellectually insulting and creatively stagnant. Now, of course, that's the kind of conspiracy version of what you're saying.

**Aaron McGruder** (2:42)
Right, right. Yeah, you know, I'm not sure if there's, you know, three or four guys in a room planning all this out. But, nevertheless, I think, you know, we're doing pretty bad right now. And, you know, it does bother me because it is true that there were...