I'm not going to change anyone's mind - and no-one here has convinced me - especially as I'm coming from a position where I too used to defend this practice and have deployed the same arguments in the past.

For what it's worth, I've changed sides myself - until quite recently I would have taken a position similar to the one you're taking now, i.e. that when anyone looks at black face make-up they're bound to see something racist.

I said above that it was seeing Black Pig that changed my mind:

They do black up; they also wear top hats, frock coats, scarves, feathers, badges, veils, goggles - you name it - and perform stick dances with such ferocity that they can finish with one fewer stick than they started with. When we saw them at Bakewell, my (Russian folk-dancing) daughter was so enchanted with them that I seriously looked into whether they had a satellite side near us.

Actually it wasn't so much the Pig themselves as my daughter's reaction to them. She's one of the most unprejudiced people you could ever meet; if anything she's actively anti-prejudiced, and tends to react against the slightest reference to someone's gender, ethnicity, orientation, ability etc. I'm pretty liberal, but I grew up in the 70s, when you had to work at not being prejudiced. Her generation would no more pass a racist comment than they'd watch Watercolour Challenge - it just wouldn't occur to them.

So if she can watch 30 blacked-up musicians and dancers for half an hour without thinking any the worse of them for it - in fact, without thinking anything except "where can I get some more of this?" - that suggests to me that black face makeup doesn't automatically ring the 'they might be racists' bell. It needs something else - and I think what it needs is the suspicion that the people doing it aren't edgy young steampunk rebels, but middle-aged guys who are into English traditional music but haven't thought deeply about what they're doing. In other words, that they're typical folkies.

To me it boils down to this: when we look at folkies do we think "ooh, ye olde England - I bet they're 'kippers"? And, if other people looking at folkies do think that, how do we react?