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Perhaps the most popular image of the American minstrel is that of a white man in blackface performing a variety of racist skits and jokes, like those performed by the Christy Minstrel Singers in 1842, and/or singing whitewashed notions of slave plantation songs, like those performed by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer in 1927. The era between and including these two landmark years in minstrel history, 1842 and 1927, not only provides us with our most popular image of the American minstrel show at a time when it was, according to many scholars, America's most popular mass entertainment, but also represents the minstrel show's lowest point aesthetically and ideologically. Significantly, in Spike Lee's film Bamboozled, when the character Pierre Delacroix pitches his idea for the satire "Man Tan and the New Millennium Minstrel Show," he states that the minstrel show began in the 1840s.1 While Lee is right to search for satire in the 1840s, as a historical fact this statement is somewhat misleading. The minstrel show began before the 1840s, but it was not called a minstrel show until 1842, a date that marks its downward slide into racist representation. It is for this reason, perhaps, that historians have begun searching elsewhere for a more complex understanding of the minstrel show, expanding their focus to include both what came before 1842 and after 1927. The somewhat surprising consensus among scholars is that, before 1842, blackface performance was not a particularly racist activity. This is not to say that the minstrel show lacked racist elements before 1842, but that it was more concerned with doing the positive work of class warfare from the bottom up, binding together the poor against the rich rather than white against black. W. T. Lhamon elegantly assesses minstrel history when he notes that blackface "marked the entry not of any authentic blackness into American and Atlantic culture, and not of any exclusively working-class position, per se, but of a relational opposition that has used racial and class markers to stage a continually sliding disaffectation from the dominant culture."2
To understand what happened in 1842 that changed the course of blackface performance, scholars have begun to examine minstrelsy's performance genealogy. However, because of a tendency to view the minstrel show...