EKU Pride Alliance Offends African-American community - Perspective

Less than 24 hours after I posted the Shirley Q. Liquor article to the TransGriot blog, I received word from friends matriculating on the University of Louisville campus that Shirley Q. Liquor was poised to bring her noxious act to the Eastern Kentucky University campus in Richmond, KY.

A team of activists and other concerned parties immediately mobilized to stop the show and at the same time educate people on why we in the African-American community were so upset about it.

We got the word last night that the performance slated for April 29 was cancelled.

EKU Pride Alliance offends African-American community - Perspective


There have been new developments since we got the word of the cancellation of the Shirley Q. Liquor show at EKU. The Director for Multicutural Student Affairs Zenetta McDaniel Coleman wrote a response to my orginal letter that was published in the May 4 issue of EKU Eastern Progress. She's African-American and seems to have the opinion based on her letter that Shirley Q. is performance art.

Shirley Q. Liquor show strictly performance

As Director of Multicultural Student Affairs, I am compelled to write this letter in defense of Pride Alliance and the Shirley Q. Liquor controversy. This is especially important having just concluded a campus observation of First Amendment Week, which included information about freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

The letter that was published in last week's issue of The Progress by Monica Roberts, who is not even a member of Eastern's campus community, had some misinformation. Pride Alliance did take into consideration the reaction of the African-American community in late February when it was considering bringing Shirley Q. Liquor to campus.

On two separate occasions, this topic was discussed with leaders of black student organizations at a biweekly meeting we have called the Meeting of the Minds. There was some discomfort expressed by a few of the members, but the majority of the membership felt it was OK to have Pride Alliance bring her to campus. This topic also was discussed with various students who frequent my office with very little dissent.

It would have been impossible to have polled every single student. One student went as far as to commend Pride Alliance for even approaching the black leaders since many student organizations could care less what other non-members think about their programming and/or events.

What we all need to keep in mind is that this is an institution of higher learning. Your purpose as students is to gain knowledge, have new experiences and hopefully develop a greater level of objectivity. I just wish that those who protested would have taken the time to see the performance and then decide collectively how to respond.

This is about culture, and drag is strictly performance. What if a student organization wanted to invite the Wayans brothers to campus? In the movie "White Chicks," the brothers portrayed black men who dressed up as white women. Still, I did not read much about any type of disturbance at the movie theaters because most of us were inside enjoying the show.

As it turns out, Pride Alliance canceled the show, a gesture the group clearly did not have to do. I want to say thank you to the members of Pride Alliance for respecting the feelings of others on campus. Most don't know that by canceling the show they lost a HUGE amount of money as Shirley Q. Liquor was already under contract and had been paid.

Lastly, some students who might be unaware of university protocol are under the impression that I "approved" Shirley Q. Liquor's performance. It is not my place to approve or disapprove anything student organizations want to do. It is my role to advise those organizations to which I serve as faculty adviser and to support every student on this campus.

That is what I am here to do and that is what I will continue to do.

Zenetta McDaniel Coleman
Director of Multicultural
Student Affairs

My Response to Ms. Coleman

To Ms. Coleman, The EKU Pride Alliance and the EKU community,

I had to respond to Ms. Zenetta McDaniel Coleman’s May 4 letter in the Eastern Progress.

While I may not be matriculating on your lovely campus, I am a resident of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the taxes I pay help support this institution. I visited the EKU campus for a recent fencing tournament a month ago.

Thanks for enlightening me to the fact that the EKU Pride Alliance consulted with African-American student leaders. You are correct in stating that the Pride Committee did a commendable job in consulting with non-members about bringing Shirley Q. Liquor to the EKU campus. That leads me to wonder whether they knew on some level that Shirley Q. Liquor’s appearance on campus would cause a problem and wanted cover so that they could say if things blew up “Well, we talked to African-American leaders and they said that it was okay.”

The Pride Alliance had to know that Shirley Q. Liquor’s appearance at EKU would cause drama. Performances in New York, Boston and Washington DC had been picketed and canceled. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has criticized the show. National gay newspapers have written articles on the controversy since 2002. Keith Boykin’s blog has an archived article about it. I wrote a May 2005 column in THE LETTER that talked about this issue and that article is on my TransGriot blog.

If the Pride Alliance wanted to bring a drag act to campus, I’m sure that the folks at The Bar Complex in Lexington or The Connection in Louisville would have been able to recommend someone either locally or nationally whose performance would have been more respectful to our culture.

And now, here’s a synopsis of the Shirley Q. Liquor show:

Chuck Knipp’s act caricatures an impoverished Black woman and draws from a number of stereotypes about African Americans. Shirley Q. speaks Ebonically, spends her days waiting for government checks to arrive in the mail, and has 19 children (some named after venereal diseases). The fathers of these children are unknown to her.

Is this the show you wished that people on the EKU campus could see, Ms Coleman?

Maybe you didn’t hear Chuck’s rousing song ’12 Days of Kwanzaa’. It’s a favorite Christmas ditty of white supremacists and was broadcast on several Southern radio stations last year.

I’m glad you brought up the Wayans Brothers and their ‘White Chicks ‘ movie. The difference between the Wayans brothers and Chuck Knipp is that the Wayans Brothers aren’t intentionally disrespecting white people with their one-time performance. They aren’t selling merchandise based on those characters in a section of their website entitled ‘Gifts of Ignunce’ or doing a performance tour based on those characters called the ‘Tour of Ignunce’.

I noticed you didn’t dispute my point that blackface images still carry much pain and historical baggage for many African-Americans even in the early 21st Century. The history of these images is linked with white supremacy. ‘Darkie’ products, theatrical pieces such as ‘Birth of A Nation’ and jokes arose to support those images that were used from the 1830’s through the early 20th century to demean, ridicule and lampoon African-Americans.

Sounds eerily familiar to Shirley Q. Liquor’s act.

The timing was also horrendous. Kentucky is in an uproar over a gay student being expelled from the University of the Cumberlands. Money is being cut from several Kentucky college budgets (including EKU’s) to fund a pharmacy school on a discriminatory campus. In the middle of all this turmoil a white gay man appears to perform on a state funded college campus doing an act that lampoons African-Americans.

Can you say PR disaster?

In the Spike Lee movie ‘Bamboozled’, blackface and minstrel images were used to satirize the way Hollywood misuses Black images and he was harshly criticized for it. So if Spike Lee couldn’t get away with using these images, what makes Chuck Knipp think that he can? .

I sincerely thank the EKU Pride Alliance for respecting the feelings of my community and making that painful decision to cancel the Shirley Q. Liquor performance.

I do have one final question, though. Is it too late for the Pride Alliance to put a stop payment on the check they sent to Chuck Knipp?

Monica Roberts
Transsistahs-Transbrothas Founder
Louisville, KY