Minstrel songwriters sentimentalized slavery they never witnessed or opposed

Evidence

And the muses for their songs were people they had seldom ever encountered, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s beloved minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker-or an actual uncle: Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-deceased) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white travel writer, poet, and literary critic Bayard Taylor’s assessment, included in his 1850 book Eldorado: Or, Adventures in the Path of Empire. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1113

Categorization

• XREF: The sentimentalizing of a brutal institution parallels the ‘immodesty panics’ pattern of masking reality with tenderness — relates to the reader’s second published article.