Minstrelsy’s fans paid to watch enslaved suffering caricatured as play.

Evidence

Across the Ohio River, a short distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Kentucky, which was largely populated by enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see a terrible distortion of the enslaved depicted at play. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1106

Categorization

• SHARE: A strikingly ironic juxtaposition — the near-simultaneity of slave labor and minstrel entertainment across one river — worth sending to someone interested in cultural history.