And let me also add that the negativity surrounding the use of blackface by mummers in the US is not historically the same as it's use in Britain, not because the slaves were in the US, but because Jim Crow is a political phenomenon unique to the US, and includes the complexities of class among whites who performed blackface minstrel shows, it's largely white working class audiences, and the contexts of the changing world of race and class roles in the 19th century.

The burlesque characters of the minstrel traditions also lampooned the affectations and hypocrisy of the growing middle class. By 1843 in the US, when the Virginia Minstrels appeared on the scene, the blackface minstrel tradition was already far from it's folk theatrical roots of mumming, and was rapidly developing into a new form of musical entertainment known as the minstrel shows, the debauched versions of "clean" middle music concert entertainment of the middle and upper classes, whose audiences were becoming more middle class than working class--a phenomenon which still plagues the "folk" traditions of Anglos and Anglo Americans down to this very day. By the 1850s in the US, the blackface minstrel show was cleaned up, and it's burlesque and working class aspects largely gone, and it was solid, middle class entertainment. The only aspects of it that weren't cleaned up in the process of the tradition and it's audience changing, were the dark and disturbing racist elements in it. And that is poisonous legacy we all are left with in the US especially, when it comes to looking at this largely white, middle class, extremely racist "entertainment" tradition.