LOS ANGELES - Charles Knipp, a.k.a. Shirley Q. Liquor is scheduled to perform is his racially offensive comedy act during Black History Month on Sunday, February 11, 2007 in West Hollywood at The Factory.
West Hollywood recently played host to the infamous Michael Richards incident in which the comedian hurled racial slurs and epithets towards two African American men.
Charles Knipp is a white gay man who performs racially offensive material aimed at African Americans in drag and blackface. He is known for using his comedy routine to reinforce negative stereotypes of Blacks for mostly affluent white gay audiences in South where he is extremely popular.
He describes his character Shirley Q. Liquor as an "inarticulate black welfare mother with 19 children." While in blackface as Liquor, Knipp speaks in Ebonics and makes comments like "axe your mamma how she durrin" and misuses words like "ignunt."
In addition, Knipp mocks the Black American holiday Kwanzaa (video below) and uses Black faces to make fun of stereotypical Black names in a music video entitled, "Who Is My Baby's Daddy?"
Knipp's white character, a woman named Betty Butterfield describes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a "colored preacher" during a video segment on the Lutheran Church.
In Knipp's online store on his website he sells among other things, an ornament for a Christmas tree for Kwanzaa that says, "Happy Kwanzaa to Your Mammanems."
There's an entire section of baby bibs with racially offensive and insensitive messages including "INMATE," implying young Black babies are headed to incarceration from birth. Add to that rainbow bumper stickers that read, "I love coloured people."
Check out the maddnes below:
One of Knipp's most ardent supporters is none other than Black drag queen RuPaul who argues that Knipp's portrayal of Liquor isn't racist.
Rupaul is reported as saying, "Critics who think that Shirley Q. Liquor is offensive are idiots. Listen, I've been discriminated against by everybody in the world: gay people, black people, whatever. I know discrimination, I know racism, I know it very intimately. She's not racist, and if she were, she wouldn't be on my new CD."
Knipp has shows booked for both New Orleans and Hartford, Connecticut after Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles show is reportedly almost sold out. The venue holds over a thousand people.
"As a Black woman, I am extremely offended that given the racial tension in Los Angeles, a venue would even book an act like this," commented activist Jasmyne Cannick. "I am even more offended that there are people in Los Angeles that would buy tickets to a show like this. If Knipp were making fun of certain other races, there's no question his act would have been shut down a long time ago. I am tired of people using Blacks as the punch line of racial jokes and laughing all the way to the bank. It's 2007 and this madness has got to stop. Black America needs to send a clear message that we are not going to tolerate the promotion of negative stereotypes of our race being used and exploited for money and a few laughs. He may be popular in the South, but this isn't the South, this is L.A. and Blacks here are going to send Knipp a clear message: We're not having it."
Black activists in Los Angeles are planning a protest if the show is not canceled.
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source:
Jasmyne Cannick
jcannick@sbcglobal.net