[I'm working on an essay of minstrelsy which is too long to repeat in its entirety here. But I'll post a few excerpts. Any feedback is welcome.]

So how then did whites in America see the blackface minstrel? Did the burnt cork on the face mean only that this person represented a black slave or freedman or did it signify something else? Seeing the close ties between mummers, Morris-dancers and Zwarte Piet to blackface minstrelsy, we see something else at play than simple crude racism—although there is plenty of that too. In many areas where minstrelsy was quite popular, blacks had been all but run out and kept out.   Why would whites do that only to crowd into the theatres to watch a minstrel performance of whites with blackened faces? Because they did not wish to see real blacks. What they wanted to see was themselves from a past they viewed as idyllic. Minstrelsy was popular in the urban areas and in large cities, northern cities in particular—New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and on into California. The whites that populated these cities had left the farms and rural existences of their childhoods were vicariously returning to it through the watching of minstrel performances.

In the minstrel show, blacks were not worked from sunrise to sunset, were not whipped or punished to any significant degree and had an inordinate amount of leisure time on their hands—much of it spent on finding ways to get out of work than actually working. Even then the work was nothing more than sweeping up, polishing the silverware, cleaning up after supper, etc. In other words, the blackface slaves, who rarely if ever called themselves slaves, were really children with their daily chores around the house. In the minstrel shows, massa and missy were rarely seen and, when they were, they were there to be deceived by a slave trying to get out of work. Sometimes, they delivered a light scolding or rebuke for the slave's deception or laziness but there was always easy forgiveness and security in the form of love, food and clothing. In turn, the slaves loved their masters in spite of constantly deceiving them. The slaves were happy but knew that their happiness depended upon the moods of their masters and even outright lying to them was acceptable if it kept them happy. Again, this was nothing more than the family relationship of parent-to-child and child-to-parent. The slaves thought of the masters as their parents and the masters treated the slaves as though the latter were children.

Minstrelsy then provided an outlet for the white city-dweller to relive his or her idyllic childhood back on the farm. As earlier stated, the country was in the grip of tremendous changes—physically, socially, technologically, demographically, economically, politically, culturally, etc. Many white Americans suffered a culture shock. Instead of living off the land as their own bosses, they now worked in factories for meager earnings and a boss who didn't care about them and thought nothing of overworking them or throwing them out on the street. They were largely wage slaves not particularly better off than the black slaves in the South. Those slaves at least had a roof over their heads and some amount of food in their bellies and no fear of being fired or laid off. The wealthier whites had social respectability to maintain and upon them fell the white man's burden. They were expected to lead the way and pay for it.

So what was the meaning of the blackened face? Even many black minstrel singers donned the burnt cork residue. Why would they have to? We must remember that the concept of "white" as a race was new.   What did it really mean to be white? White Americans were not sure. As hard as they looked into it, the concept of being white meant nothing without differentiating it from being non-white. In the modern age, we are used to white supremacists counting every technological innovation to come out of Europe as proof of the superiority of the white race, but in the 19th century such a device was rarely resorted to for the simple reason that most Americans today termed as white did not think of each other as white. Americans of English descent, for example, often did not regard those of German descent as white and vice-versa. After all, the English had a global empire, why should they include anyone else as being on their level who was not part of building it? Neither English nor Germans regarded Italians as white and so on. The Irish and the Dutch (who once dominated the extremely lucrative spice trade via the Dutch East India Company or VOC as it was known before the British took over) were often excluded from the white race in the American mentality as were Jews, Poles, Slavs, Spaniards, Portuguese, Danes, Greeks, Gypsies and others. Basically, white Americans were just starting to embrace the idea of being "white" as a globally dominant race rather than as disparate cultures rooted in Europe. The idea that all these various European nations—England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, etcetera could or should be combined into one and whose innovations, inventions and cultures were the expression of a single great race was only just tentatively taking hold in the 1830s. It ascended in the national consciousness along with minstrelsy and progressed in step along with it until the culmination of Theosophy and Aryanism in the late 19th century that seemed to fill in the missing pieces (even if in a pseudo-scientific, non-verifiable fashion) at which point minstrelsy began a slow decline.