Blackface Minstrelsy

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Adam Max Cohen

African Americans have long objected to the stereotypes of the "plantation darky" presented in blackface minstrel routines. Frederick Douglass expressed African American frustration with the phenomenon as early as 1848 when he wrote in the North Star that whites who put on blackface to perform in minstrel shows were "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." Douglass was incensed that whites enslaved blacks in the South, discriminated against them in the North, and then had the temerity to pirate African American culture for commercial purposes. While blackface minstrelsy has long been condemned as racist, it is historically significant as an early example of the ways in which whites appropriated and manipulated black cultural traditions.