American popular culture originated as white performers’ racist caricature of Black music.

Evidence

Before the Hampton Singers and the Jubilees started performing, nineteenth-century Black music had never reached the masses through Black artists. What the country at large heard was something altogether different. It was the music of Black people as performed by white people, a cartoon of the dances they did and the way they spoke. It wasn’t Black music at all but blackface minstrelsy—white men painted pitch-black doing dopey (but not unskilled) dances and singing comic songs as they imagined Black people might. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1101

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s anti-blackness infrastructure thesis the reader is tracking, and to complicity studies of mass culture.