Reddit reviews Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Race and American Culture)

It's basically the consensus so I didn't have a specific source in mind, but books like these may be good starter points:

> "For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a 'blackening of America.' "

Google Scholar and JSTOR searches should yield similar results. Blackface is terrible because it's a mockery of a long-repressed culture and basically a symbol of the majority's theft of that culture, though in an odd sort of way it also almost served as training wheels for that majority culture to eventually accept to some extent actual artistic expressions from that culture itself. Are there a hundred better ways that this transition could have occurred without intentionally or unintentionally being a colossal dick for several decades? Absolutely.