Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) quoted in an article by Harmeet Kaur at CNN. This is why blackface is offensive
As an old white man many of my white friends insist they're not racists. I don't think I'm racist, but I'm old enough to know that all my years of training and indoctrination into whiteness sometimes rears its head. Sometimes it's ugly and shocking to me.
A good rule of thumb is blackface is always wrong. This afternoon I saw a video clip of Pat Paulsen on the Merv Griffin Show circa the late 1960s telling awful ethinic jokes in blackface. All the while Paulsen is interspersing the jokes with commentary that it's time to give up on such demeaning humor.
Paulsen almost certainly imagined the routine as satire. It could only work as satire if the routine made people very uncomfortable in seeing how ugly such humor is. It almost suceeds. But the deeper revelation, if we're honest, is that it does not succeed and everybody knows it.
Racism lives in us and when we pretend, however convincingly, that we can't see it, we are prey for those who will manipulate that within us.