No one had to read about the recent incident at Punchers Sports Bar to know discrimination is rampant amid Baton Rouge nightlife.
When LSU law student Jasmin Hughes was denied entrance to Punchers because her leggings violated the bar’s supposed dress code, it was just another drop in the bucket alongside other similar cases of barroom inequality.
Punchers co-owner Michael Labat said the bar welcomes all patrons. He also said the bar’s dress-code list, if the owners were to produce one, would comprise “hundreds of pages.” But since that tome hasn’t been written, the bar’s denial of patrons is completely relative, based only on appearance and not on standards.
Any bar is entitled to its own procedures and expectations as far as customers go, but to say the bar employs a dress code without being able to provide the specifics of that code is unfair and unreasonable. If these establishments don’t justify the reasoning behind their regulations, they float into the dangerous territory of discrimination.
An additional prime example is Quentin Anderson, another law student who was turned away from the doors of Punchers. Anderson said he was denied entry because he was wearing a fraternity T-shirt, which the doorman called “gang attire.”
Blindly labeling a college fraternity as a “gang” is absurd. Will that fraternity shirt incite a riot? Doubtful.
That Punchers would turn away a patron for wearing fraternity gear is a stark contrast to what happens in Tigerland, a Greek-happy community of bars where fraternity attire guarantees automatic entry into the in-crowd. Instead of ousting Greeks, bars like Reggie’s and Mike’s turn away patrons clad in visible tattoos, solid white T-shirts or backward baseball caps, clearly targeting a different stereotype.
The biggest problem here, aside from the fact that these bars are losing business by turning away mostly innocuous customers, is that the establishments don’t uphold their rulings consistently and fail to justify the basis of the regulations. Greeks have reported being able to enter Tigerland bars during exchanges even when clad in attire that supposedly violates the set standards, meaning what happens there and at Punchers is nothing short of profiling.
How are leggings inappropriate? White T-shirts? Perhaps if the aforementioned bars would provide explanations — or even established lists — it wouldn’t feel like equality has become an afterthought.
It’s not as if Punchers and Reggie’s are known as high-brow drinking holes. Owners should stop masking blatant discrimination with a dress code.
