Yes, minstrel shows started in the 19th century – and were one of the U.S.’s first popular forms of entertainment. But they were never seen as harmless, at least not by African Americans. “Frederick Douglass decried blackface performers as ‘the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.'” – The Atlantic