What legacy did blackface minstrelsy create for American culture today?
Eric Lott: Minstrelsy is the first public commercial venue in which blacks, though of course, they’re not blacks, are represented on the theatrical or musical stage. It’s the arena, for better or worse, in which black people come to be displayed and black issues come to the floor, in the American culture industry, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s and extending all the way to our own day. Not only does minstrelsy mirror in many ways the cultural and social predicaments of the country in the 19th century, it itself changes form and gets new life every 20 years or so until, as a stage form, it basically dies out in the 1920s and migrates to film, where it has a very long afterlife all the way to the present day in a film like Warren Beatty’s Bullworth. Now its political charge varies enormously through the decades, but there are exemplars of the minstrel tradition all around us, both white, as well as black. The centrality of it as a cultural institution makes it an inescapable cultural c
