![]() He’s equally scathing about the BBC bosses who backed The Black & White Minstrel Show to the hilt before belatedly pulling the plug in 1978. Harewood barely attempts to conceal his outrage as he bristles at what he describes as “an offensive racist construct made into entertainment” – a construct that, he argues, played a large part in embedding racist views across modern society. ![]() He traces the origins back to Thomas Dartmouth Rice, an American actor and fervent anti-abolitionist who popularised his Jim Crow character on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1830s, spawning a host of imitators who turned minstrelsy into mainstream entertainment. The unsettling emotions that actor David Harewood felt as a young black child exposed to the prime-time BBC show is what sets him off on this diverting hunt for the origins of minstrelsy, the term coined to describe blackface musical shows. ![]() At its peak, 21 million viewers tuned in to watch white performers black up for song and dance numbers that played on cartoonish racial stereotypes – something unthinkable today. ![]() For 20 years, in the 1960s and 1970s, The Black & White Minstrel Show pulled in huge audiences. ![]()
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