The Weird Afterlife of Black Bart Simpson
I was watching Sugar Hill for my big 1994 project and I saw something that really took me back. It was a mural of The Simpsons but there was something decidedly different about this particular image.
Though Bart Simpson is, canonically, white, or at least a jaundiced yellow at the height of Simpsons mania a black version of the skate-boarding, authority-flouting, Butterfinger-promoting pop icon became ubiquitous on bootleg tee-shirts.
The Simpsons has been on the air for so long that it’s easy to forget how utterly massive it was at its height. In the early 1990s The Simpsons wasn’t just a hit show; it was a bona fide pop culture phenomenon.
The Simpsons was well on its way to becoming the greatest television show of all time when it became a massive, money-making pop culture fad.
Suddenly the Simpsons were everywhere. I have vivid memories of going to Walgreen’s and seeing one aisle devoted exclusively to New Kids on the Block merchandise and another filled with nothing but Simpsons products: water bottles and key chains and dolls and tee shirts and all sorts of crap that helped make Matt Groening richer than Mr. Burns.
In my memoir The Big Rewind, I wrote about a surreal evening spent playing The Simpsons arcade game all night in Black Muslim hangout on the South Side of Chicago and how, during my first night in a mental hospital the nurses complained loudly about Bart’s misbehavior.
The Simpsons were massive on a level that’s hard to even wrap your mind around these days in no small part because the entertainment world was much different and much smaller.
The internet was just a beautiful, perverted, ultimately deeply destructive dream. The introduction of FOX as a fourth network was a big deal. Bruce Springsteen recorded a song about having “57 channels and nothing on” and people couldn’t begin to understand having that many entertainment options.
The demand for official, licensed Simpson merchandise was so great that it created a massive market in bootleg Simpsons merchandise, particularly tee-shirts. Despite what Black Bart Simpson’s appearance in Sugar Hill might suggest, the African-American Simpsons were largely a tee shirt phenomenon.
In that respect Black Bart Simpson was analogous to another fad from when I was in high school: Inner City Looney Tunes.
In the early 1990s Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the Tasmanian Devil were all re-born as urban hipsters sporting the latest street fashions and wearing their clothes backwards in the manner popularized by Kriss Kross.
Wearing your clothes backwards was never cool. It was extremely lame when Kriss Kross did it and that was their whole shtick. That and hating fellow kiddie hip hop outfit ABC because inside out is wiggety, wiggety, wiggety wack.
Kids loved Bugs and Taz and Bart Simpson. Kids loved black culture, black music and black athletes so why not mash up the two?
Black Bart Simpson and the totally Krossed out Bugs and Taz represented an early form of culture-jamming. They were mash-ups combining familiar icons of white pop culture with black clothes, black attitudes and, in the case of Black Bart Simpson at least, black skin.
When I was a kid in Chicago I’d sometime go to Maxwell Street, which was a big open air market full of enterprising souls selling bootleg merchandise and tasty yet suspiciously inexpensive hot dogs. It was a black neighborhood where tee shirts featuring Bart Simpson as a righteous soul brother outnumbered those where he had yellow skin.
God knows white folks have appropriated just about everything black people have done through the decades. It only seems fair that black people get to appropriate white icons of their choice.
It’s crazy the way things are re-conceived these days. As a child who loved comic strips and dreamed of someday becoming a cartoonist despite a complete lack of artistic talent I revered Calvin & Hobbes as the heir to Peanuts and a comic strip that wasn’t just funny but wise and profound as well.
So it’s nuts that multiple generations know Calvin not as the greatest comic strip character this side of Charlie Brown but rather as an impish sprite urinating on various things.
Once characters exceed a certain level of fame and popularity they come to belong to just about everyone. The Simpsons reached that level. So did Looney Tunes and Calvin & Hobbes.
That’s why so they spawned so many mutations and variations. They’re black. They’re white. They’re mainstream. They’re cult. They’re American and that brings with it all kinds of weirdness and confusion and contradictions when it comes to race and, well, just about everything else.