Blackface Drag Queen Feels Regret. Almost. | Kenyon Farrow | Writer. Speaker. Activist.

To the last point, Knipp says: “Wealthy white people are starting to hire me for private parties, where I play the raisin in a bowl of oatmeal,” he says. “From the way they interact with me, I can see that my being there as Shirley makes them feel it’s acceptable to openly mock black people in a way they otherwise would not, and that does cause me to have second thoughts. If what I’m doing is truly hurtful, then I need to stop.”

Well I am glad he realizes that. But I guess the mounting protests over the last 5 years of mostly black people (and in NYC, whites and other allies of color) hasn’t mattered at all to you? So it took white people to make you stop and think about what you were doing? It doesn’t make me pity him. It makes me understand the ways black people (either physically or sybolically–in the case of mostly non-black people “performing” blackness) are just fodder for a conversation about white people–their anxiety, their suffering, their “humanity.” In other words, black people’s collective pain, anger, and frustration mean absolutely nothing to white people, unless it’s in solidarity with some other groups’ pain–which is why the white gay orgs are always looking for a black minister to support their poltical aims–yet they never get behind issues that impact blacks a a whole, queer or not.