You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Entertainment culture

powerfully shapes the public's imagination. It always has, and sometimes in awfully damaging ways.

In her 2019 talk from TEDx Mid-Atlantic, music scholar Dwan Reese lays out the lasting impact the arts industry has left

by making black people into caricatures for white audiences.

When I was 10 years old, we traveled from Colorado to New Jersey to visit relatives

at Christmas time. We did a host of a variety of things.

I actually got to see the original cast and the Wiz and did a lot of sightseeing.

But one of my favorite moments was to stay up late at night and wait till everyone else

had gone to bed, and then I would sneak downstairs to watch television.

A host of old movies that probably had no business watching, such as Bonnie and Clyde and

Oklahoma, that was a little okay.

But I remember one evening come across a show.

It was an old movie, and it must have been White Christmas or Holiday Inn of that type,

but it was a musical.

And I started watching, and then they started to do this musical scene,

and I noticed I saw Bing Crosby in Blackface.

And I was confused.

I couldn't quite understand what the Blackface had to do with the singing and dancing.

That was my introduction to blackface minstrelsy.

Blackface minstrelsy originated in New York and not the South, as a lot of people would think, in the 1830s.

It was an incident where white actors would blacken their faces with burnt cork,

paint on bright red lips, exaggerate the whites of their eyes,

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