A 2023 article appearing on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website, asserts that the birth of blackface is attributable to class warfare: Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm.By objectifying formerly enslaved people through demeaning, humor-inducing stock caricatures, "comedic performances of 'blackness' by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, [could not] be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core". This process of "thingification" has been written about by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, "The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify", and by Aimé Césaire, "Césaire revealed over and over again the colonizers’ sense of superiority and their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers, a mission that depended on turning the Other into barbarians".
A 2023 article appearing on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website asserts that the birth of blackface is attributable to class warfare Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt “squeezed politically economically and socially from the top but also from the bottom invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority but outside of the white normBy objectifying formerly enslaved people through demeaning humor-inducing stock caricatures "comedic performances of 'blackness' by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up [could not] be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core" This process of "thingification" has been written about by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe "The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify" and by Aimé Césaire "Césaire revealed over and over again the colonizers’ sense of superiority and their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers a mission that depended on turning the Other into barbarians"