To be honest, I don’t know how to feel about these shows. I want to feel outraged, but I fell like it’s not my place to be outraged. I feel ashamed that I am part of this kind of culture, even if it is in a lesser form now. But it mostly just makes me tired. I realize that these shows had a huge influence on the direction of music in America, but it gets me so mad that that influence had to come from something so disgusting.

It makes me wonder if everything is like that really. Does everything that has changed America come from being awful in general? This whole country’s history starts with the reckless bloodshed of its native peoples, from the Aztecs to the American Indians, and hasn’t gotten much better since. We fight off anyone who wants to have the slightest influence over us, and we build walls to make sure everyone else stays good and out. And as if that weren’t bad enough, when we get bored we go out and start trouble ourselves!

How would American culture progressed if the Minstrel shows had never been a thing? Would we have found some new way to be awful, or would we actually have done something right for a change and tried to mend a relationship. I’ve read that the reason a lot of racism still exists in America is because we never talked about slavery in an open way. We fought a war to end it (kind of) but then we immediately put it in our history. There was no discussion or accountability. It was a thing of the past, just like that. Would the American public have benefited from some kind of open dialogue? Absolutely. But we don’t have it. It’s why I feel I don’t have a right to be outraged, and why I feel ashamed of myself.