Last week there was much hand wringing over UCONN law students throwing a party where the participants chose to dress up as hip hop gangsta rap artists. The condemnation was swift, although no one seems to mind actual hip hop gangsta rap artists throwing parties where they all dress like law students. Or maybe it’s because the Beastie Boys haven’t released a new hit recently. From The Courant:

The interim dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law has scheduled a schoolwide roundtable discussion for today to air concerns raised by a weekend off-campus party in which some law students dressed in hip-hop clothes and toted 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. Photos of the “Bullets & Bubbly” party were posted on the popular website facebook.com, dismaying some students who regarded the party theme as racially insensitive. Photos depicted partygoers wearing do-rags, muscle shirts, hoodies, and necklaces with gold medallions.

So how to explain the outrage over a white minister from Kentucky dressing up in blackface to paying audience in Hartford? Also from The Courant:

Shirley Q. Liquor is a drag queen known across the nation for performing as a poor black Southern woman with 19 children, a welfare boozer who speaks in Ebonics. Her shows are usually packed to capacity, with audience members laughing in hysterics, many of them white. “How you durrin?” she greets them.

But without the housedress, the bright wig, dark cosmetics and orange lipstick, Shirley Q. is a white minister from Kentucky named Chuck Knipp.

Later this month, Knipp is scheduled to perform his blackface routine at the Chez Est in Hartford, drawing condemnation from some patrons who call the performance a modern-day minstrel show that has no place at the friendly neighborhood gay bar, especially during Black History Month.

Ah yes, college students dressing up as the musicians whose musical groups that they listen too, that’s bad. But if they were instead doing it in drag, and as comedy, well that is okay, right? Especially if it’s conforming to a political meme that has been reinforced by some other southern white males who dressed up as congressmen.

Bryan Cousins is the manager of the club, Chez Est, who doesn’t see what the big deal is. Again, from The Courant:

Couzens said it would compromise his integrity to censor a performer. “You give me a solid reason to cancel the show, and don’t say, `Because a white man is doing blackface,’” he said. “Give me a solid reason.”

How about perpetuating a racist stereotype that singles out welfare recipients? That should be reason enough.