If you’re not looking closely, you may be missing the parade of nonfiction and fiction titles by Black authors being shown to the next generation of Proud Family viewers.
Originally debuting in 2001, The Proud Family became a fixture on the Disney Channel and ABC’s One Saturday Morning featuring an African American 14-year-old middle schooler named Penny Proud as she navigates friendships and family in the Los Angeles area. Disney+ rebooted the cartoon this year with 10 episodes streaming now under the title The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder. And this is giving the creators more freedom to get their racial justice message across screens to a wider audience witnessing the Black Lives Matter and the #BlackStoriesMatter movements.
The voice of Penny Proud since the show’s inception, Kyla Pratt is the star, with her cartoon doppelgänger, but for the new series Keke Palmer joins the cast to voice Maya, a social activist who’s a new transfer to their Willy T. Ribbs Middle School. The school is named for the first Black driver to qualify and race in the Indianapolis 500. The Easter eggs of activism are really hidden in Maya’s book choices throughout the episodes.
We’re introduced to Maya in the first episode “New Kids on the Block” where she and her brother KG, voiced by rap artist A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, move into the old home of original character Sticky, who was voiced by Orlando Brown. That character was written out most likely due to Orlando’s legal troubles over the years, but Penny and her group now have two new friends. Or so they think.
Maya detects she and Penny are not compatible based on Penny trying too hard to make a connection. After all, Maya is carrying a copy of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, a 2019 nonfiction book by sociologist and Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin that examines how society’s focus on technology can reinforce White supremacy and push racial inequity.
Later in the premiere episode, Maya is in her school hallway, armed with a copy of Parable of the Sower, the 1993 post-apocalyptic climate fiction classic by Octavia E. Butler that is set in our current time period. A24 last year announced it secured the rights via Deadline to the Parable of the Sower and its sequel Parable of the Talents for a plan to turn the titles into two motion pictures with Garrett Bradley tapped to direct.
In second episode “Bad Influence(r),” Maya is carrying the civil rights graphic-novel memoir March: Book One by the late congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell in different scenes throughout the episode.
“It All Started With an Orange Basketball” is the third episode that explores how Penny’s love for basketball is squashed by the ambition of her father, Oscar Proud, hilariously voiced by comedian Tommy Davidson. This episode will be distributed in book form for early readers by Disney Press in September under the same name. Game scenes occur in the Bubba Wallace Recreation Center, named for the only present-day Black race car star who pushed for the ban of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events in 2020.
The episode also features Maya and LaCienega, Penny’s frenemy who’s a namesake of the famous South LA boulevard and voiced by Alisa Reyes of 1990s Nickelodeon’s All That fame, chatting in the Wendell Scott Regional Branch Library, named after the first Black race car driver to win a race in NASCAR’s Grand National Series.
LaCienega rips a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ Between the World and Me out of Maya’s hands to use as a prop to bump into Kareem, Penny’s sorta boyfriend voiced by Asante Blackk, to get his attention. He notices the selection and says it’s his favorite book, and LaCienega lies and says it’s her favorite, too. They walk into the sunset.
Masquerading as the woke reader, LaCienega holds the book in other scenes while Maya is now reading James Baldwin’s 1963 nonfiction essay collection The Fire Next Time.
Another literary reference is in the episode “Home School” where Maya is reading Maya Angelou‘s 1969 autobiographical debut I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (Perhaps, this character is named after one of our most influential Black female authors?) Even in the “Snackland” episode starring an animated Lizzo voiced as herself as the musical guest for the Proud family’s amusement park venture, Lizzo’s bodyguard character is reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, but she rips it into shreds proving she can destroy Oscar for skipping on Lizzo’s payment.
The book choices, along with the intentional naming of the buildings the characters frequent, demonstrate the ability to educate children and adults on important, sometimes underappreciated Black literature and Black figures via a kooky cartoon centered on a Black family and a racially diverse cast of characters.
Some of these books, such as Race After Technology, do not appear to have a mass marketing campaign. So, if you’re interested in the intersection of race and technology, for example, this book may not end up in your web, library, and bookstore searches.
Then for classics such Parable of the Sower and The Fire Next Time that are usually not on young adult reading lists, they can be left out of searches for books covering their topics. Along with highlighting the obscure and classic works, the cartoon gives props to the more recent best-sellers by Black authors that have dominated charts over the years like Between the World and Me and The Vanishing Half.
Disney+ renewed The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder for a second season.