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HRC at Jena 6 Rally: Logan Air-Traffic Controllers Puzzled by Flying Pigs

Well, I'll be damned. Joe Solmonese, Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the conservative gay rights lobbyist group, got his behind to the Jena 6 Rally today!

I'll admit it. I'm surprised that HRC actually supported a political event that was not specifically related to gay people! Though they did raise a furor over James Byrd's brutal murder (a black man dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas) years ago, this is unprecedented. In fact, the HRC has been talking about this issue for the last week. What's going on here? Has hell frozen over?

As I said in my commentary on the Don Imus brouhaha, black people are getting tired of this crap. This is another explosion in less than a year that has galvanized black people. I know for me, on a personal level, after seeing my people left to drown and starve in New Orleans two years ago, my tolerance level for obliviousness about racism went down to almost nil. I have very little patience for people who refuse to critically engage the world around them when it comes to race.

No one is going to deny that some things have improved for blacks since the 1950s (note, however, that we are going backwards in some of these areas as well--see the statistics on housing and school segregation, for instance). But the Civil Rights Movement was stopped in its tracks in the late '70s, and blacks recognize now, as we did then, that we have a long way to go. I think many blacks now want to continue down that path, so courageously forged by the early Civil Rights leaders. We are ready to pick up where we left off, and the eruption caused by the Jena 6 case reflects that.

I was watching CNN's coverage of the Jena 6 earlier today (inbetween doing Attic Greek paradigms) and I heard one of the reporters say that it sounded like they were in the 1960s with cries of, "Black Power!" coming from the audience. I don't know if this was just typical media sensationalism or whether this was an accurate reflection of sentiments at the rally. If there is any truth to what she said, I'm not surprised. It shows that many of us long for a radical movement that will truly liberate black people one day.

I think this move by the HRC is a good sign and a small step in the right direction. It is a sign that people are beginning to feel more comfortable making political connections--even really conservative groups like HRC. I suspect Solmonese and his staff recognize that something important is going on in Jena, Louisiana and that this mass galvanization of blacks and their supporters has wider political implications for everyone--especially queer people. Of course the HRC's overall corporate, mainstream orientation has not changed, sadly. But something about this case caused them to do something unusual and I wouldn't sneeze at that.

No, revolution is not right around the corner. But we may be in the very, very early stages of what could turn out to be some pretty important changes in this country.

The Jena Six

Reflecting on drag and offense and apologies.

So another drag queen has been offensive.

1. And this drag queen (the one writing this) is not making any excuses for her but yet she feels, as does her brother, that the anger and charges of racism and demands for apology and indeed the subsequent apology from Miss Kitty Litter are somewhat misplaced or misguided.

2. Drag queens are characters separate from the performers playing them. This line is sometimes blurred by the fact that the performance is often fluid and involves a fair amount improvisation, but they are still characters separate from the (usually) men who play them.

Miss Kitty Litter (MKL) is a character. And from all accounts, she is a character who does not believe in political correctness. Some of us might even call her character racist. She was hired by the Pride Committee to host a show. During that show she was her usual (again as far as has been reported) politically incorrect and/or racist self. A person in the audience complained, loudly and publicly. And now MKL has issued an apology and asked us not to blame the Pride Committee. But you see, I do. I blame them entirely.

3. As far as I am concerned, MKL was hired to do a job and she did it. Indeed going by the passion of the response, she did it very well. She has nothing to apologize for, perhaps hurt feelings, but she should feel absolutely no need to take any of what she said back, because her character is not interested in political correctness. Her character says things that are hurtful, and that was what she was hired to do, play her character.

More than once, in comments on this blog, it has been voiced that it is unbelievable that in 2007, people find racist jokes funny. I disagree, racist jokes can be funny. What is unbelievable is that in 2007, people can’t see why what they are laughing at is offensive.

4. Expecting political correctness from a drag queen is really problematic. More than once now on this blog, a drag queen has been called racist. Yet not once yet have I heard a drag queen called a misogynist. Why Are drag characters always either overtly sexual to the point of being two dimentional or silly? Can women not have a voice as opposed to moving their lips to what someone else is singing? No, and yet I never hear the charge of misogyny. Why do we ignore one kind of hate and oppression but jump all over another? What is really happening here?

I am personally disinterested in political correctness, I find that all it does is illuminate what a speaker is uncomfortable saying.

Now we might say, “but Boston Pride had no way of knowing EVERY thing that came out of her mouth”. To which I can only ask if Boston Pride knew the work of the artist they were hiring.

If they did, then the blame falls squarely on them. They didn’t need to know exactly what she would say. If they knew her work, then they should have known she is not interested in being politically correct.

If they didn’t know her work, then there is a lot more explaining to do. Why would you hire an artist whose work you don’t know? I’m guessing she was paid, it seems like a bad idea to invest in an unknown commodity. If she wasn’t paid, why was Boston Pride shipping a queen in from Rhode Island giving her publicity and prestige instead of supporting one of its own?

5. Why pick a drag queen if you don’t know her work? Certainly there is an appreciation at Boston Pride that all queens are different. Surely there is recognition that every drag queen brings with her something other than color and a dress. Drag queens are not, in fact, an indistinguishable mass of eyelashes, heels and sequins. They are in fact individuals. And ought to be treated as such.

If the Boston Pride Committee doesn’t know that, then I might ask, where have they been every year at well, Pride?

Again I ask, what’s really happening here?

New Bedford Raid

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The Shirley Q. Liquor Saga: What a Racist Minstrel Show Says About Queer Politics (Long)

Also see Mark's post on Shirley Q. Liquor here.

Charles Knipp is a white gay man who dresses in drag as a black woman, using classical “blackface” themes (dark makeup, huge lips, the most offensive and demeaning stereotypes). Knipp’s show may be worthy of disdain and outrage, but the response to his show from all sides says some important things about the state of politics in the queer community. While the response from Knipp’s defenders is appalling in its naiveté and contempt for black suffering, the response from many of his detractors points to major weaknesses in radical queer organizing.

First, let’s talk about Knipp’s defenders. I have not seen Shirley Q. Liquor live, but I have heard some YouTube clips and, I’m sorry, but Knipp’s performance is unequivocally racist and disgusting. I have heard every excuse and rationalization of Knipp’s performance his apologists could think of. His defenders say that the show is actually inviting us to “laugh” at racist stereotypes (similar to the excuses offered for the Snickers ad campaign). Knipp’s defenders also say that his minstrel show is okay because some black people, especially RuPaul, think it’s funny. Others argue that because his show has some basis in reality (there actually are black women who are similar to Liquor), that the show should go on.

If the gay community represented the cutting edge of anti-racist politics, and my friends and I had not encountered racism in the gay community so much, I might say that these justifications were wrongheaded, but understandable. If the gay community were mature and sophisticated on race issues, I would say, yes, maybe we can laugh at racial stereotypes. But the gay community does have serious problems with racism, and consequently excuses for Knipp have been made by people who do not live in reality, but would rather see the world through the fantasies of American white supremacist discourse.

In white supremacist Candy Land, segregation and racial discrimination are over. In this alternate universe, they ended when Martin Luther King made some speech about “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” subsequently warming the hearts of white people in Congress who out of the goodness of their white hearts bestowed upon us Negroes civil rights. In white supremacist Candy Land, racism and discrimination are so over, in fact, that we can proclaim that “gay is the new black.”

Blacks, who by and large still suffer from segregation in education and housing, experience widespread discrimination in employment, have to deal with a wage and unemployment gap that has not gotten much better since the 1960s, and must continually face injustice in the so-called criminal “justice” system, have simply disappeared from the radar of many gays. Black oppression has taken a back seat to the oppression white gay men, some of whom proclaim that gay oppression is not just comparable to racial oppression, but has supplanted racial oppression!

Now let’s take the Shirley Q. Liquor minstrel show in the context of a world in which blacks still suffer from widespread racism and discrimination. You really do have to take that seriously in order to understand the outrage. Read the comments at Jasmyne Cannick’s website about Shirley Q. Liquor and you will notice that there are few comments about the concrete nature of racism—there may, in fact, be no comments about this. I do not recall a single comment about how the stereotypes promoted by Knipp reinforce a destructive and deadly regime against black Americans in this country. Instead the comments were about how this show “offended” black people and how blacks should not be “offended.”

So I want to say this to the oblivious, uncritical philistines who defend Knipp very clearly: This is not about my feelings or the “feelings” of any other black person. This is about the pernicious culture of racism that still exists in this country. We are pissed off because Knipp is reinforcing a racist culture which has real, concrete effects on the people we love. It is only people who live in the la-la land of white supremacy that talk about being offended and so-called “political correctness” as if these were the only issues.

And it has been well established that the fog of white supremacist ideology blinds everyone, regardless of race or color. Do a little more research on the black experience in America beyond the whitewashed (pun intended), high school black history surveys we are spoon-fed and you will see that black political consciousness is uneven, and in all historical periods there was a segment of the black community that apologized for racism and argued against decisive action to end racism. So citing people of color who support or reinforce racism to justify racism is just silly. I don’t care if RuPaul supports Knipp, and I don’t care how many blacks you trot out to defend him. That show is racist, period. That this pedestrian “some-people-of-color-agree” argument is continually brought up despite its obvious weaknesses is really a testament to the failure of anti-racist activists to make their voices heard.

And that leads me to my point about Liquor’s critics. As angry as I sound, one might think that I approve entirely of the response to Knipp’s minstrel show. I do not. I think the uproar over Shirley Q. Liquor illuminates serious problems among the radical current of the queer movement. Our responses show that radicals have officially prioritized peripheral, cultural expressions of heterosexism in their conceptualization of political activity.

The bulk of queer radical organizing seems to have coalesced around haphazardly attacking cultural expressions and symbols (e.g. Macy’s for removing gay mannequins, Shirley Q. Liquor, Snickers ads, politically wrongheaded events by the LGBT community). The problem is that, traditionally, cultural expressions do not seem to be the focus of political action by radical groups. Historically, successful radical groups such as SNCC, the Black Panthers, ACT UP, etc seem to have coalesced around issues that concretely struck at the heart of the white and heterosexual supremacist superstructures respectively (e.g. voting rights, segregation in businesses, police brutality, urban poverty, and criminal indifference to AIDS).

Radical politics should always entail responses to cultural expressions and sharp critiques of them, but responses to cultural expressions cannot replace work that actually gets at the core of discriminatory and bigoted structures. This kind of work must be our priority, but judging from what I have seen from many radical queer groups, we have it backwards. I am not suggesting that we ignore cultural expressions that disparage people of color or queer people. Rather, I am arguing for a re-prioritization where the cultural field is no longer primary field in which we confront heterosexual supremacy.

And so, abstractly speaking, Shirley Q. Liquor may be worthy of protest. In the context of queer activism, the response looks problematic to me. It reflects a disturbing tendency among radical queers to focus most of our attention on cultural expressions of homophobia and racism. But until we begin organize, in a systematized and consistent fashion, around issues that concretely deal with oppressive structures, we will just be spitting in the wind. We may get clubs to stop hosting Shirley Q. Liquor, but we will do little to address the structures of white supremacy.

Stop Shirley Q. Liquor!

Connecticut has cancelled a scheduled performance(innews) by Shirley Q. Liquor (wiki) the drag character played in black-face by a white gay male for predominately white gay male audiences. Congrats to the Ban Shirley Q Now (myspace) group that recently played an important role in protesting this racist idiot.

This is just further evidence that there is so so so much work to be done within the LGBT community as far as issues of racism and social justice go - and there is a total lack of leadership on these issues when it comes to organizations like HRC who so far, not surprisingly, has remained silent on the issue of Shirley Q. Liquor. NGLTF has joined the nationwide movement to ban Shirley. GLAAD has also condemned the racist. Unfortunately Shirley apologist RuPaul doesn't seem to get it.

As I so often ask our community about issues of injustice - where the fuck is the outrage?

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