The Rhetoric of Heresy: The Boondocks Resurrects Martin Luther King Jr. and Agitates the Beloved Community

Abstract

The current narrative about Martin Luther King Jr.'s (MLK) beloved community is a poor imitation of his dynamic work-in-progress because it asserts that the beloved community has been achieved. This current narrative perpetuates a postracial orthodoxy, which assumes that racial and economic attitudes have been transformed by legal desegregation and the adoption of MLK as national hero, but they have not. Actually, the postracial narrative of the beloved community is in need of some heresy, which for this essay is an informed and offensive transgression meant to agitate, not destroy, dogma. As a rhetoric of transgression, heresy can agitate pious narratives so they can be useful for current socio-political and economic challenges. To understand the critical potentials and limitations of heresy, I analyze an episode of The Boondocks, which is an animated television series that uses satire to agonistically engage with postracism and perform beloved community differently. The episode's heresy is problematic because it sullies the patron saint, MLK, in order to agitate the beloved community from its postracial pieties.

Keywords:

• The Boondocks
• Heresy
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Postracial
• Transgression

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose helpful suggestions guided the revisions. A special thanks to Robert Terrill and many others for their assistance with earlier drafts, and to her C334: Heresy and Dissent class for their unexpected insights into this topic. Portions of this essay were presented at the 2011 annual meetings of the Western States Communication Association and the National Communication Association.

Notes

Referring to Socrates and Martin Luther specifically can illustrate the point that elimination and revolution—or a complete break—irreparably disrupts the transgressive conditions inherent in the heresy/orthodoxy relationship. Found guilty of violating the conventions of acceptable Athenian discourse, Socrates has the opportunity to escape capital punishment in Plato's Crito, but he refused out of obligation to Athens, or the geographic embodiment symbolizing the orthodoxy he challenged. He demonstrated obligation to the orthodoxy, and thus adhered to the punishment. His descendants take up his cause variously, but not in the same way. A similar example is Martin Luther. Although a founding father of a religious reformation, he initially did not seek to organize a new church or orthodoxy. He published a number of complaints against the Roman Catholic Church so to reform it. Not until he was excommunicated, declared wanted dead or alive, and his name evoked during the Peasants’ War of 1624 did he break from the Catholic orthodoxy and organized a new doctrine (Mullett). His revolution nonetheless created more orthodoxy and more opportunities for heresy, but differently.

All subsequent references to The Boondocks episode will be to the DVD listed in the works cited.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Heusel

Jennifer Heusel is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication and Culture and American Studies at Indiana University—Bloomington.