whoosh

liquornspice:

alexandraerin:

daniellemertina:

liquornspice:

Somebody informed me that Billy Crystal has BEEN doing blackface impersonations practically his whole career. Did em all the time on SNL.

So, just fyi…minstrelsy never went away.  People build their careers off of it. Networks have built institutions off of it.

Denigrating Black people never stopped being profitable and popular. Ever.

yep, American entertainment BEGAN with blackface and minstrelsy. Its literally the foundation of what we now call the media.

But they won’t tell you that.

Exhibit A:

The original “funny talking animal” design for Mickey Mouse and his contemporary characters was a then-standard blackface character model (like “Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid”) with animal ears. When they wanted to make Mickey explicitly in blackface, they just drew lips on him.

(Decades later, Warner Brothers tried to “rehabilitate” Bosko in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures using the same trick, by giving him dog ears.)

From the wikipedia page:

In keeping with the stereotypes of the minstrel shows, Bosko is a natural at singing, dancing, and playing any instrument he encounters. In fact, Bosko has the ability to play virtually anything as an instrument, be it a wooden bridge-turned-xylophone or a Dachshund-turned-accordion. In early cartoons, Bosko (voiced by Carman Maxwell) even speaks in an exaggerated version of black speech (However, this was only in the first cartoon. All later cartoons would give him a falsetto voice). Despite the parallels between Bosko and the blackface performers, Ising in later years would deny that the character was ever supposed to be a black caricature, and rather claim he was supposed to be “an inkspot kind of thing.”

Wow.