Minstrelsy Quotes

“Minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was a purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal, unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a black who was understood to be already outside the law and therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue. For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more ligence, and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by transferring that conflict to a black population.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Scott was a great poet - one of the greatest - but not in verse. In verse he is ever and at all times a minstrel, and nothing more. He is the modern representative of that most perennially popular of characters, the bard who weaves into living song the exploits and the adventures of heroes.”
― Mrs. Oliphant

“I knew I'd hit,” Arsenio Hall confided to a reporter not long after his show debuted (in January 1989). “White America only gets uptight when a black guy moves in next door, dates your daughter, or becomes your boss. They’ve always let us entertain them.”
― Aileen Joyce

“Esther Rolle (an African American actress who had previously played Florida Evans on the spin-off series Good Times, 1974–79), opened up with how frustrating her last few seasons on Good Times were. She resented the silly direction the show had gone in from its roots as a social commentary on a lower-class black family. She reenacted for me a scene in which her son, played by Jimmie J. J. Walker, was supposed to simply take an apple out of the refrigerator but hammed it up with a lot of over the top mugging while he pondered what food was there. I was trying not to laugh, because what she found offensive and clownish was funny to me.”
― Fred Stoller, Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star