I want to talk about a recent conversation I had in my life in regards to a discussion post I just wrote about the other day. My goal is to express myself in the most respectful way possible. I would like to talk about minstrelsy shows. To be clear, I do not think it is appropriate to mock a group or culture in any manner. I grew up in a white, conservative Christian setting. From a young age, I was taught to see people as people. It was instilled on me that it didn’t matter how able someone was or how they looked, what mattered was who they were on the inside and how they treated people.

When I started reading in my class about minstrelsy groups, I was appalled. I understand it is from a different time, but it still shocks me how terribly people can treat each other, past and present. This is something that I just read about yesterday, but the thoughts keep coming back to me. My friend asked about my class and I told them about what I had just read about. In the discussion post, I didn’t feel like there was anything for me to contribute because I have never seen or even heard of this concept before. The friend is from another generation, and they pointed out my white upbringing.

The friend talked about their African-American friend who got pulled over one time while my friend was in the car. He pulled out his licence and took the keys out of the ignition, and my friend looked at him saying “What are you doing?” He said that he has to do things differently than my friend. Similar to me, my friend initially was “color blind”, in other words not really registering when someone has a different skin color. The African-American friend told my friend that he was proud of his skin color and wanted my friend to recognize it.

Back to the minstrelsy groups, this ignited a whole new conversation that I had with this new friend. I feel like it helped that they were from a different generation. They have lived longer and had more life experiences than I have. It saddens me that this ever happened in the first place. Because it is still such a new concept to me, I haven’t been able to identify any cultural or musical points where this is still present and seen. I hope that I will not see this in my day to day life. If I do however, I plan to say something about it.

That’s all for this post; I hope it was interesting for you to read. See you in the next post!