[continued from previous message] 
  
 >>> when they queried some point of Catholic doctrine and the staff 
 >>> couldn't answer! 
 >>> 
 >>> But bigotry?  None. 
 >>> 
 >> 
 >> I am glad that you had a good experience at school. 
 >> 
 >> A while back, I suggested that the antisemitic remarks that my elderly 
 >> female friend witnessed at her school would have come from batty old 
 >> nuns who should never have been employed as teachers. 
 >> 
 >> I am not in a position to examine their personnel files or their 
 >> teacher training certificates after this length of time, of course. 
 >> But I can readily accept that batty, bigoted old nuns are not likely 
 >> to have been typical of the teaching staff at the average Catholic 
 >> school in your own day. 
 >> 
 >> However, it's also possible that bigotry won't be noticed at the time 
 >> or stay in the memory forever. In the same way, the Black and White 
 >> Minstrel Show would not have registered as racist or objectionable 
 >> when it was broadcast every week. 
 > 
 > It merely registered to me as very boring. 
 > 
 > Racism is a mindset.  Why did they put on black face? To a young person, 
 > as I was, maybe they thought we, the viewers, preferred black singers. 
  
 It wasn't that. 
  
 The tradition of performing in blackface (which in vaudeville was known 
 as "minstrelcy") goes back to the nineteenth century at a minimum. 
  
 Al Jolson is probably the name most associated with it, but he was 
 following a tradition which was at least forty years old when he started 
 in the early years of the last century. 
  
 Not all those using black greasepaint and that particular way of 
 applying it were white, by the way. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)