The practice of actors "blacking up" is no longer seen as amusing or acceptable. The once highly popular television series "The Black and White Ministrel Show", which featured blackened-up singing and dancing routines from 1958, notoriously fell out of favour and finally went off the air in 1978.
A hundred yers ago, however, the blackface minstrel tradition was a popular variety show genre. It had originated as an American entertainment in the 19th century, and was performed by white people in blackface greasepaint. It often lampooned black people, with stock characters such as "the dandy" and "the mammy",
and presented black people as ignorant, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, joyous, and musical.
Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of black-American culture.
