A Schizo Post by Grant Norman, Cultural Correspondent for Amerikaner.org. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me
“Hey, have you heard about these bug blacks?”
With those simple words, a name was given to a specter that is lurking around America. A change has been occurring over the last fifty years where the pop culture portray of black men has transformed from the cool to the lame. Where once Huey Newton and Samuel L. Jackson served as the media’s role models for young blacks, they now have homosexuals like Lil Nas X to look up to.
This is not a recent phenomenon, however. Looking back to the children’s media landscape, we can see the years-long work that has gone into supplanting black masculinity with nebbish geekery.
Why does this matter for Amerikaners?
For one, it is a valuable case study in the power that a coordinated media strategy can have on altering reality, with drastic effects on Whites, as we will see. It is also admittedly amusing to look back and remember just how many examples of bug blacks were being floated in the last thirty years of children’s entertainment.
We’ll begin our story further back, however.
The rise of television culture and the resulting flattening of the American cultural landscape coincided with the Civil Rights movement. People who would never have thought about how the different races lived together in Selma or Montgomery were bombarded with images of horrible racists and meek negroes turning the other cheek. The narrative of the saintly leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. was begun before his death and has proven to be as resilient as the Christmas music that baby boomers grew up with.
Around the middle of the 1960’s, this initial narrative began to fracture. Before then, Malcolm X received some attention, but mainly to serve as a foil to King’s character and aims. The same trick got the Iraq War labeled “the stupid war” while the war in Afghanistan was somehow deemed to be “the smart war”.
Yet after the Watts riot and its siblings, the media began highlighting the cases of more militant blacks. Gone were the reverends of the Civil Rights movement, now there were black radicals preaching black empowerment and separatism. Big hair and big guns were the mark of the new breed of black media darlings. The word “negro” was rejected in favor of “black”, to give equal footing with their White opponents.
This turn to black radicalism gave birth to numerous terrorist organizations and acts across America during the 1960’s and 70’s. The “Zebra” killings, the Black Liberation Army’s assassination of police officers, and the bizarre saga of Symbionese Liberation Army (where a group of lesbian schoolteachers broke a black rapist out of prison after convincing themselves that only a black like him could possess a truly revolutionary conscious) are all examples of this new world of scary black men and women threatening everything ordinary White Americans held dear.
When this had gone far enough, it is hard to argue that American media underwent another tonal shift. The Nixon and Reagan presidential campaigns were based, at least rhetorically, on a strong “law and order” platform, which led to both men sweeping forty-nine of the fifty states in each of their reelection campaigns.
However, in the 1980’s, the media portrayal of blacks began to soften. As Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday, the televisions of White Americans were filled with the adorable moppets of Diff’rent Strokes and the wholesome Huxtable family on The Cosby Show. On the big screen, blacks and Whites worked together to fight alien invaders in Predator or racist South Africans in Lethal Weapon 2. There was a spirit of harmony and racial unity in mainstream media that was soon to be eclipsed by the concurrent rise in harder-edged hip-hop and rap music.
In the 1990’s the dual consciousness of black-for-White media and black-for-black media broke down. Second Lady Tipper Gore led a charge against violent and sexually explicit lyrics in music, and the Rodney King riots shocked a generation of comfortable White Americans which had come of age after the burning and looting of the 1960’s. These organic backlashes contributed to a deeper investment in the kumbaya strategy. The “Burger King Kid’s Club” model of a wholly representative cast, including in many cases handicapped children, became widespread in the 1990’s. Whereas previous efforts had been focused on all age groups, the new campaign would place the tip of the spear at the heart of younger Whites.
By the time that the bug black strategy began in earnest, blacks in children’s media had long been copies of what was seen in adult media. They were the character who possessed an inexplicable “cool factor” or a strong moral compass that was used to guide their White protagonists to success. Susie Carmichael of the Rugrats was one of the last “wise young negros” on a prominent children’s cartoon, before the new regime took over. The trouble was that these models were, in fact, still too aggressive for White audiences. The moral superiority and increased athleticism of these black sidekicks gave them the potential for threat.
Enter: The Bug Black.
Here were specimens that posed no threat to White Americans by virtue of their social awkwardness and physical weakness. In correcting for charismatic and athletic black characters, the powers that be created the ultimate geeks. Goodbye, Fresh Prince. Hello, Steve Urkel. These bug blacks predominated in children’s animation of the late nineties and early 2000’s, with such examples as AJ from Fairly Odd Parents, Wade from Kim Possible, Irwin from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Tucker Foley from Danny Phantom, and, to a lesser extent, the buffoonish Cyborg from Teen Titans. On the live-action front, there was the ur-example of Simon “Cookie” Nelson-Cook from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow, and the crippled Stevie from Malcolm in the Middle.
The predictive programming of these new bug blacks furthered multiple agendas. Beyond the goal of getting future generations of Whites to lower their defenses and view blacks as not just benign but harmless, there was also a strong effect on the blacks themselves. Fond of consuming media and products as this population was, it was soon inundated by images of capering black nerds and large segments of the black population began to internalize this thinking.
Today we can witness the total destruction of black masculinity, helped in no small part by the programming bombarding their society by media. Blacks can still be whipped up for rioting and looting, and everyday black-on-White crime is still an unfortunate fact of life in this country, but on the average the population has gotten more docile, and thus better consumers.
It is telling then that the torch for a black-faced assault on White America has passed to African women. From Beyonce strutting around in Black Panther garb during a Superbowl halftime show to the grotesque mountain of flesh Lizzo piping away on James Madison’s crystal flute, black men have been pushed aside by their matriarchs. Rhetoric about the violence faced by black bodies (itself a degeneration from black “soul” in the 1970’s) has been replaced with the mantra that black women are the keystone to America’s democracy, and this has occurred with hardly a challenge by the displaced black men.
We can see how the media’s predictive programming has worked to affect the outcomes of larger political questions in this country. Beyond the mainstreaming of homosexuality and transsexualism through a bombardment of positive news and entertainment, what was the election of Barack Obama to the presidency if not the ultimate manifestation of the trope of the magic negro appearing to fix all of Whitey’s problems? Would Donald Trump have been elected without the two most popular shows of the 2010’s being about Mexican drug cartels in Breaking Bad and the efficacy of a giant wall keeping out danger?
The narratives that we consume shape our worldview, and can leave us manipulated in a far more diabolic fashion that an outright command.