Sixty years of minstrel shows normalized grotesque images of Black people

Evidence

White performers jostled with each other to lay claim to being the “real thing,” the real “Black” thing. Night after night, for six solid decades at least, audience upon audience looked on gleefully, and the false ideas being told about Black people took on lives of their own. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article pattern — mass entertainment normalizing degrading images of a group through repetition.