‘South Park' Colin Kaepernick Season 20 Premiere Clip: Don’t Celebrate Just Yet, #BlueLivesMatter

A new clip from the South Park Season 20 premiere gives us a new national anthem, which has been widely interpreted as mocking Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality ("I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." Kaepernick said to NFL’s media outlet). Fox News described the South Park premiere clip as “a bit that makes fun of Black Lives Matter supporters who have rallied behind San Francisco 49er backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick.”

The lyrics certainly validate this reading:

"Cops are pigs, cops are pigs

Wait, someone just took my stuff, I need to call the cops

Oh no, I just said cops are pigs

Who's gonna help me get my stuff?

Why did I listen to Colin Kaepernick?

He's not even any good

Oh, I just got all my stuff back

Cops are pigs again, cops are pigs

Colin Kaepernick's a good backup"

But the #BlueLivesMatter crowd may not want to celebrate just yet. South Park has always portrayed cops as racist, lazy, stupid, sadistic monsters prone to abuse their power. The Season 20 premiere is unlikely to change that tune.

Originally, South Park had only a single cop: Officer Barbrady. He was very nearly too stupid to function, constantly out-maneuvered by children. As South Park became more and more about current events in later seasons, Barbrady proved insufficient for addressing issues of racial profiling and police violence. In Barbrady’s most recent (heartbreaking) appearances he became the scapegoat for our societal anger at cops. In “ Naughty Ninjas,” a Season 19 episode, Barbrady is portrayed as a well-intentioned man whose vulnerability to our anger ruined him, even as more uncaring and selfish police continued to get away with their crimes.

But most South Park police are nothing like Barbrady. Instead, the Park County Police, lead by Sergeant Harrison Yates, provide essentially zero public service. The South Park police spend their time framing black people for crimes and shooting black people, a depiction easily aligned with the real-world police violence decried by Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement. Even when they’re not conspiring to frame and murder black citizens, the South Park police are woefully incompetent, engaging in self-destructive gunplay, failing to catch serial killers and laughing off sex crimes.

It’d be hard to find a more disparaging portrayal of police anywhere on television.

So it’s surprising that police-affiliated publications and presumptively pro-police outlets like Fox News are using this clip to proclaim South Park pro-cop.

The controversial police site LEO Affairs — known for its anonymous message boards where law enforcement officers mock police violence victims, spread racist stereotypes, stump for Trump, compare protesting football players to monkeys and dox anti-police violence advocates — describes the video as “praising Colin Kaepernick for his bravery before realizing the protest is pretty dumb and that maybe deriding cops is a bad idea because you actually need them,” concluding that Colin Kaepernick is “basically being an idiot.”

Which is not to say that South Park is a stalwart ally of the Black Lives Matter movement or progressive social justice initiatives generally.

What we’re seeing is an attempt to map the specific perspective of two individuals, South Park’s creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, on to the neatly binary sides drawn by our social and mainstream media. But we get closest to South Park’s true intent by looking at Stone and Parker’s perspective. Raised in white suburbia and now part of a presumptively liberal media environment, South Park’s latest position on cops is less about taking a stance in a national debate and more about a personal reaction to their surroundings.

In the town of South Park the loudest cop-haters are white, middle-class, well-intentioned liberals who don’t hesitate to call the police when a homeless person makes them uncomfortable. On South Park, police aren’t solely to blame for their rampant violence and racism, but are an extension of larger societal prejudices and class resentments. They are weapons that NIMBYs, limousine liberals and the comfortable upper-middle class can turn against racial minorities, societal unrest and the unsightly poor, all while tut-tutting police violence to their friends. The Season 20 premiere is likely about what South Park sees as a common hypocrisy (at least in their social strata) more than it is about police.

That doesn’t mean anyone has to like it. South Park has often been defended with some variation on “they mock everyone,” but that’s unlikely to satisfy those for whom police violence is a daily concern. As far as South Park ideas go, the message of this anthem seems lazily simpleminded: imagining critics of outsized police power abuses as against the very concept of law and order.

South Park doesn’t tend to map to either side of national arguments, confounding our attempts to read too far into its messages and themes. Instead, South Park is better viewed as despising human venality, hypocrisy and meddlesomeness. There’s never any shortage.

Also, it’s a joke.