Why The Boondocks Should Be Studied in High Schools Just Like Shakespeare and Hemingway
“My only love sprung from my only hate. Too early seen unknown but known too late …” I could go on and on reciting Shakespeare from memory because we had to read it out loud and memorize it in high school.
Let me say this plainly: Aaron McGruder and his comic series The Boondocks deserves a seat in the canon.
We study Shakespeare for his wit and layered metaphors. We study Hemingway for his style and emotional restraint. But when Aaron McGruder takes pen to panel and lays bare America’s contradictions through satire? That’s dismissed as “just a cartoon.”
Nah. That needs to stop.
McGruder is a modern-day Shakespeare. A modern-day Hemingway. A modern-day McGruder.
Let’s stop acting like the elevation of Black brilliance and literature is radical. It’s overdue.
McGruder’s work—through The Boondocks—is one of the most important cultural texts of the 21st century. He did with satire what most writers can’t do: he told the truth, made it funny, and made it stick. He peeled back the performative layers of America’s democracy, racism, classism, and hypocrisy—and he did it in a comic strip (then an animated series, which is groundbreaking in and of itself).
That’s literary excellence. That’s what we call timeless.
But here’s the issue…
The canon—the sacred list of what’s considered “important literature”—has never truly reflected us. Black literature and art in America is qualified as “Black,” but it’s American literature and it’s always been brilliant. Always been universal. Always been world-shifting – even when it’s steeped in Black culture.
But rarely has it been treated with the reverence it deserves.
We uplift Shakespeare for writing about kings and chaos, but McGruder showed us revolution at the dinner table, in the classroom, at the corner store. That’s not less important. That’s more relevant.
Cultural storytelling deserves the classroom.
If we’re going to teach students how to analyze tone, dissect symbolism, and understand cultural critique, why wouldn’t we teach The Boondocks?
McGruder gave us Huey—part political theorist, part child prophet. He gave us Riley—hip-hop personified and social commentary in Timberlands – maybe hip-hop materialism? He gave us Granddad—complicated, flawed, human – doing the best he could.
It’s time we stop calling that “entertainment” and start calling it what it is: literature.
This isn’t about comparison—it’s about correction.
It’s about giving students the opportunity to see themselves in the stories they analyze. To know that their language, their culture, and their communities are worthy of scholarly exploration. It’s about teaching them that critique can be funny, that cartoons can be sacred, that satire can be just as powerful as soliloquy.
Aaron McGruder’s work belongs next to Shakespeare and Hemingway not because it mimics them—but because it challenges them.
And that? That’s what real art is supposed to do.
If you’re a teacher, a student, a cultural critic, or just someone who believes in the power of storytelling—share this. Let’s stop waiting for permission to make our stories required reading.
Because The Boondocks is required reading.
It’s legacy.
I wrote an entire dissertation on The Boondocks and made it available publicly because that’s how the movement starts. Access for as many people as possible.
TAP HERE to get my $10 Boondocks dissertation (and Howard University dissertation defense video that made me a Dr.)
