Read more about Uncle Ruckus at: Wikipedia Official Site: Washington Post Uncle Ruckus, also known as Rev. Uncle Ruckus and Rev. Fr. Uncle Ruckus, as well as Uncle Ruku while serving at Robert Freeman's Soul Food restaurant The Itis, is a fictional character from the Boondocks comic strip and animated television series The Boondocks. A self-hating black man, he disassociates himself from other African American as much as possible, and is outspoken in his support of what Huey calls the "white supremacist power structure." He is voiced by Gary Anthony Williams. Uncle Ruckus's name is an amalgam of Uncle Tom and Amos Rucker, the latter being an African-American United Confederate Veterans member, who allegedly wanted to stay a slave after the Civil War. Uncle Ruckus (no relation to any other character on the show or in the comic strip) is repellent in appearance, behavior, and attitude. He has an intense hatred of anything pertaining to black people, and goes out of his way to free himself from this identity; Ruckus claims God says the path to forgiveness for being black is to rebuke your own race. He has a glass eye from the beatings he received by his father. Ruckus champions the small traces of French, Native American (although it would seem that Ruckus holds hatred toward anybody who isn't white) or Irish ancestry he claims to have (though a DNA test showed he was "102%" Africa descent "with a counter 2% margin of error"), and wishes that all black people were still enslaved. He prattles white supremacist rhetoric and calls Michael Jackson (who suffered from the pigment skin changing disorder vitiligo) a "lucky bastard", as he no longer looked black. Ruckus claims that he himself has "re"-vitiligo, to explain his own skin tone. During the Civil Rights Movement, he protested against Martin Luther King's marches, and would occasionally throw bricks at him, but usually missed. Ruckus served on a jury in 1957 (making him a minimum of 70 circa 2009) in Tennessee that helped convict a blind black man of killing three white girls. In spite of being blind, the African American man supposedly shot the three with a Winchester rifle from about 50 yards away. (Ruckus is the only black person on the otherwise all white jury, in what is a Jim Crow courtroom.) During his first encounter with the Freeman family, Ruckus sings "Don't Trust Them New Niggas Over There," in the pilot episode, though he socializes freely with the Freeman's thereafter. Ruckus believes firmly in racist assaults, hurling invectives of prejudice and hatred to all things black. On being asked if he supported the use of the word "nigga," Ruckus says: "No I don't think we should use the word, and I'll tell ya why. Because nigga's have gotten used to it. That's why. Hell, they like it now. It's like when you growin' crops and you strip the soil of its nutrients and goodness and then you can't grow nothin'. You gotta rotate your racist slurs. Now I know it's hard 'cause 'nigga' just rolls off the tongue the way sweat rolls off a nigga's forehead. But we can not let that be a crutch. Especially when there are so many fine substitutes: spade, porch monkey, jiggaboo. I say the next time you gonna call a darkie a nigga you call that coon a jungle bunny instead." |
|
Uncle Ruckus