When you consider the huge part minstrelsy played popular culture throughout a large part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is difficult to conclude it cannot have had some influence on morris, and it certainly contributed some tunes. My own view is that it probably reinforced an existing tradition of blacking up, but blacking up does not itself come from minstrelsy.

The point is that there are other reasons for blacking up besides imitating, let alone derogating, black people. There is nothing else in morris which appears to have any other connection with black culture or gives any suggestion of imitating or derogating it. Many black people have no difficulty recognising that blacked-up morris is not about them. If some take offence, the answer is to explain it, not change it.