Blog week three

After finally narrowing down the topic, and the specific area within in the topic, I have began to look at my journal articles, looking at the origins of minstrelsy and the viewpoints that would have been expressed during the time and nowadays. My article The Seeming Counterfeit”: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy” covered one of these areas. My belief is that I feel I must understand the origins and all views from the audience to see what they would see, and how this could be interpreted back then in order to keep my bias from getting in the way.

Several quotes within the article stuck out when reading. It seems there were many views on Blackface performers, and many people seemed to be split between the two. One famous writer, Fredrick Douglas, called Blackface imitators “the Filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens”. However, it is also stated that while many people agreed with this, society embraced the actors and the shows, and considered Blackface performing to be “an American invention”, and that the minstrelsy “originated on the plantation and constituted the “”only completely original contribution””.

I found this interesting, since if these shows were continuing today, there would be outcries and the courts and laws would be all over the place on racial issues. However, in this time, even though there were issues with the shows and actors, people were allowing it to happen simply because it was an “American classic” and it was one of the only type of performing that originated in America through the adaptation of European theatre mixed with Black dialect, music and dancing.