How To BLACK: An Analysis of Black Cartoon Characters (feat. ReviewYaLife)

i hereby declare a state of emergency code black black huh that's the worst color there is no offense there carl i get it all the time do i watch cartoons class i remember sometime last year being really excited when i first heard about cartoon network's new animated show craig of the creek and i'd be lying to every single last one of you if i said that my excitement didn't come from the fact that the title character was black cracker creek was created by two white guys matt brunette and ben levin who were former writers on steven universe and universe before that [ __ ] is great mostly a good while ago i saw this video about a round table that recently resurfaced in my mind is craig the creep pandering because the main character is black and is created by two white guys no no [ __ ] no no are you are you kidding me no apparently there's people out here who feel this way and i'd be lying to you all if i told y'all that y'all weren't [ __ ] stupid man poor awestruck fox you can really tell he's annoyed by the um the clip art hey man keep your head up everything will be bruh but a lot of people have expressed that it feels like the show is pandering to an audience and that comes from the main character craig being african-american that basically corrects black for no other reason than just being black see i think this is the first thing i remember sticking to me when i first saw this video because if there's people out there who really feel this way about black characters we have a lot to unpack about the implications of this mindset and you know i feel like i'm a pretty good authority on this kind of thing huh oh why because hold on sorry that was a lot [ __ ] i lost the momentum man it's it's just [Music] i'm blacker than because and i'm black y'all and i'm black y'all and i'm black y'all and i'm blacker than black and i'm black y'all i'm blicky black blacker than black black i'm black and it black yo because i'm black and i'm black the character does not need a reason to be the race that they are just because the character happens to have black skin does not mean that them being black needs to be a plot element or device to tell the stories i feel like this argument sort of just eliminates the whole idea that black people are just people at the end of the day because that's uh that's what we are there's no one black experience we don't all wake up and do the same thing every day there are very much so black kids out there who live their everyday lives much like the white characters that you'll see on tv we need our film wars we need our boondogs we even need stuff like the jellies to show that there isn't just one way to write black characters i have very much so but in the same room as gerald huey number five and lil d it's normal in case you didn't realize there's a lot of us these characters aren't just black basically for no reason other than being black they're black because they actually exist and i know them hey gerald hey see huh why the hell is d-dub man to review your life calling me hello yo tune man that's the latest episode of power okay doing uh um uh how long has it been seven months bruh get your black ass zone somewhere like i have the animated music video man with your old do you remember haircut as on somewhere man i i cut my afro that's hey man uh dw man of review your life please subscribe look i'm sort of in the middle of recording this video about black characters and animated shows um i mean you got anything you feel like you want to add yeah being a bonafide negro myself oh boy i gotta say i do have a couple of things to say about the cartoon industry and their black characters first things first my biggest gripe with black cartoon characters is always the haircuts they always give them these awful non-thought out negro looking haircuts from the 80s with the flat tops and afros bruh we don't even do that anymore man it's all about the fades and no white cartoonist knows how to draw fade and it always baffles me it always does this is in video games too but we're talking about cartoons but going down to personalities wise it's always been hit or miss with black characters so we have characters like aj who's honestly just as a bald sweater best smart black kid and he's honestly the only redeeming character and the fairy eyed parents because everyone else is dumb we also have johnny tubacle from edna nettie who's just known as the weird kid who just has an imaginary friend which gives him the actual character of just being a random kid in a cul-de-sac instead of just being the black kid and then we have the real ones like fillmore from fillmore and he he's just awesome in every way he has the specs he gets the swag and he doesn't like his chicken dry and one last thing baby that chicken was dry real dry all right for right here you gotta you gotta put the clip of him not liking his chicken dryer you'll love the clip i'm sure you've seen the clip yeah yo you know what i'm talking about [ __ ] oh [ __ ] wait i don't think i was supposed to but yeah fillmore was just that hall monitor kid busting crimes left and right and he had the charisma to back it up now does that mean that he only had it because he was black nah i'm sure that they could have easily wrote a white person in it however it did make it more dynamic that he was black the writers made sure that wasn't the only thing making him stand out so basically wrapping it all up my standpoint is you can have a character who just so happens to be black and that's how they should be written from this point on in my opinion however if you do have regular creeks or static shocks that shows the whole urban lifestyle of a black guy is it really anything different from any other family's lifestyle i'll let you be the judge wow um yeah you actually um helped me prove my point thanks man i he didn't um he didn't send me any like goodbye audio so no but he's right though you can tell any story with a black character just like you can tell it with any race you can take fry from futurama and make him black and literally nothing changes not a single story element not a single character interaction honestly you don't even have to change his voice oh [ __ ] that's racist now please understand that throwing black cards characters in atypical black character situations is extremely important not every character with brown skin needs to be a political statement a character like clyde from nickelodeon's the loud house is important because there's a black kid who's adopted with two dads somewhere out there who is extremely happy because he feels normal because he sees himself a character like craig is important because there's a kid out there who isn't as cool as gerald or as smart as tucker but he's in the middle he sees himself and the problem with the number being so scarce is that it's damn near impossible for every black kid to have a character that they can identify with on air at the exact same time and if we're talking about black women i got like five and they all got the same damn voice my name's susie what's yours i know for susie one of the most important things was that she sound smart and that she's very well spoken because there were not a lot of brown girls in cartoons as a matter of fact there still aren't i mean let's face it i do the voices of all the brown girls and all the animated brown girls there's still ain't that many because there's this really crazy belief that black girls don't watch cartoons and that we don't collect comics and then we don't like sci-fi and that's bs we love it and honestly what's more racist making random characters black just because you can or only making characters black when their race is a part of the story we can have both it doesn't just have to strictly be one or the other yo check this out black guys drive a car like this yeah but white guys see they drive a car like this it's true it's true we're so lame i always love this clip from home or not poo because it perfectly articulates how a lot of black comedians just get a cheap easy laugh but honestly jokes like this don't really help the narrative that all black people have different lives and personalities and experiences if anything it pushes against it because it literally says hey all black guys do this you know how many damn black guys i know who drive their car like many you look at a show like disney channel's the proud family from 2001 the proud family was extremely clever in making sure that there weren't any black people do this white people do that jokes or story lines because they knew it wouldn't add anything but in the same show they didn't shy away from the fact that penny was black they celebrated kwanzaa she spoke slang there's literally an episode about segregation that has one of my favorite exchanges in animation history integration is new it's gonna take time for people to get used to it if they ever get used to it we will get ready because it's going to happen and when it does people like you and me are going to be the best of friends although the sat will still be culturally biased in your favor but it'll be better than it is now if i think of it the proud family was mad progressive remember when penny played football yo put my [ __ ] grand baby in the game yo to counter this aaron magruder's the boondocks ran on the narrative of black people do this black people allow that since the entire series serves as a critique on what's thought to be black culture if any of these shows help deconstruct the whole black people are all a certain way narrative it was this show and it was because it was a literal mirror the boondocks geniusly was able to be a love letter to black culture but also a critique on every single toxic element in said culture it's a shame that a lot of people didn't even really catch on until much later or wrongfully interpret what it means aaron magruder did not want oprah to be president do y'all not even understand the context of this [ __ ] ending behavior is like we don't snitch in black culture we don't show love for too long we take advantage of one another self-hate ew what [ __ ] we ain't gay i just wanted to talk to basically you know he was talking all that suck my dick [ __ ] i wanted to come to his face and actually show him how we suck dick you know me he didn't want to step to me like a man so i know we blindly support one another without context ah [ __ ] on top of that in our last video on regular creek i saw an abundance of comments saying oh so you only like the show because the main character is black and you're black wait because that actually happens i've very much seen black people flock to the theater to go see black panther despite not seeing a single marvel movie before oh and trust me there are millions of black marvel fans but there were people in the theater who were literally only there just because the cast was black oh what's the problem didn't you just say that that was literally the reason you were excited for quaker creek listen you're 100 right the difference or more so the exception to the rule is that with black animated characters there's so little an amount especially if we're talking about right now representation is important after all so we latch on to whatever characters we can because the number is so scarce hold on how many [ __ ] black cartoon characters is it on tv right now i can name five aggies cartoon characters it is none it is none they cancel static shot nobody remember fillmore it's like we don't got [ __ ] the only other black character is this [ __ ] weird ass oh no they killed chef all [ __ ] south so we don't have [ __ ] so i said [ __ ] that we about to make this black and he ain't got no guns he ain't shooting no [ __ ] basketball and and he's a [ __ ] goober and we're gonna put him on tv and he's the lead character there are so many movies that come out every year with black leads [ __ ] like black panther only annoys me because that's the only one y'all thought it was cool to see this year but i definitely didn't go see girls trip yeah i definitely didn't go see a wrinkle in time because i didn't see that [ __ ] either oh but you know i'm sorry we had to support black panther so that we could see more of this [ __ ] if you don't shut the [ __ ] up and go see the hate you give with the 35 year old playing a high school kid from the tv new addition movie you know the one mr telephone man this i'm sorry i just [ __ ] hate black panther honestly i don't even know why i'm explaining this mentality the boondocks does it way better than i ever can i'm voting for obama because he's gonna lower my taxes actually he has promised to raise taxes at your income level huh well i also support obama because he's against corporate bailouts that is also not true and he's going to get the troops out of afghanistan right also wrong then what the [ __ ] that [ __ ] gonna do i'm supporting obama because he black and lastly you don't need to be black in order to write or create black characters [Music] a white person writing any black characters is only wild when the story is solely about the black experience or what it means to be black it would only make sense if stories of this nature were handled by black writers who experience that elements of having brown skin that are being articulated because the emotions are there they're in them they aren't fabricated i'm not saying that you can't write about something that you haven't experienced but you have to understand the risk of inaccurately portraying a group that hasn't ever had the chance to say how they've ever been portrayed in media animated or not first movie and sound the jazz singer one of the first mickey mouse cartoons first blockbuster first film to get a sequel and first film to ever get played in the white house the birth of a [ __ ] nation so of course we'd be highly sensitive to how we're showing and everything this is the first time in history that we were ever able to speak up about it so listen [ __ ] but i'm saying this to say anybody of any race can write a story about gerald and jameel arguing over a girl because their race isn't their personality their culture is evident in creating who they are yes so is everybody's but it all amounts to how well the writers know them as characters because they're normal people the best episodes of the cleveland show are the ones that focus on cleveland cleveland jr donna rallo or roberta as characters and not play up the hall oh we can tell family guy jokes but with black people now no that's that's not how representation works that's not how characters work i appreciate that the creation of the cleveland show led to them realizing that they had to give cleveland more personality instead of just making him the slow talking oh rash nash a weird neighbor with the cheating wife however adding all these black faces to the show made it seem like they were forced to incorporate our culture into the stories that they were telling even when they didn't have to and it's even wilder when it comes from a crew that doesn't even study it the cleveland show shouts look at me i'm black so damn loud that it starts to become [ __ ] embarrassing why the [ __ ] are we getting episodes about kanye west rap battling cleveland junior referring to how george bush doesn't care about black people for the 50th time why the [ __ ] do we get episodes about nicki minaj and the illuminati why the [ __ ] do we have cleveland playing basketball with barack hussein obama look i understand it's a branch off of family guy a show that's designed and created as satire a critique on american culture this type of nature is expected in its sister show as well but at least family guy was written by americans you are trying to authentically write and critique a marginalized oppressed culture that you aren't even a part of that is very difficult difficult but not impossible thanks gems a similar thing happened in the 1970s with the sitcom good times about a poor african-american family living in the projects a lot of the show's writers were white on account of it being a spin-off of maude which was a spin-off of all in the family and yes a lot of the writers were black as well but it dealt with a lot of black satire much like the cleveland show did i think where good time shines the most is that you can hear the heart the care and the arguments in the writer's room poured into the stories in every line of dialogue this isn't something glanced over for joke purposes they had to be careful because they knew this representation was important to a generation the writers of good times even felt guilty questioning if they were doing the right thing allowing a show of such magnitude to even partially be written by people not of said color when you have an all-white group of people writing for black people it's going to be touchy because you don't know me you don't know what i feel you don't know what i want we had to get those scripts first we had to break them down to see what we thought they were there by we have the debates which sometimes could get heated many times i would get this script and i would say invariably what is this about what is that about and if i didn't like it i would say can i change that and give you something that's the same kind of joke but less derogatory okay there was i think a racial element which unfortunately is never missing from these kind of shows especially when the actors i will have to say it are black and the creator personnel behind it are white care they were careful and they cared the cleveland show does not give off that same feeling the cleveland show just feels like it's throwing us a bone but you know how the cleveland show could have worked really well write cleveland as cleveland write rallo as rallo write donna as donna and stop trying to remind us that they're black my happy black face animation has definitely not been the biggest thing in black culture but that's because we've never felt welcome every black character that we get is important period and it's not important who their voice by who they're modeled after or who they're written by it's important how they're written there are black jocks there are black leaders there are black problem solvers there are black geniuses there are black geeks there are black cool guys and there are black guys who live in the suburbs they all deserve to be represented in the animated entertainment that we all consume and listen to all those who's wondering why a character is the race that they are saying that they're only that race for pandering reasons and nothing else okay well yeah well you know what happens when you think that way you know what happens when you question why diane is vietnamese or why connie is west indian or why craig is black that means that you feel like being white is the [Music] default do [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: ToonrificTariq

Views: 2,946,235

Keywords: black cartoon, black characters, cleveland brown, penny proud, oscar proud, the boondocks, spiderman, into the spiderverse, cyborg, class of 3000, miles morales, analysis, reviewyalife, african american, the proud family, disney, filmore, craig of the creek, cartoon network, danny phantom, gerald, hey arnold, doc mcstuffins, numbah 5, cree summers, suzie, rugrats, classic, the jellies, tyler the creator, huey freeman, riley freeman, family guy, study, racist, racism, good times

Id: uOwhBkoNK0g

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 13 2019