minstrelsy

[ min-struhl-see ]

noun

1. the art or practice of a minstrel.
2. minstrels' songs, ballads, etc.:

   a collection of Scottish minstrelsy.

minstrelsy

/ ˈmɪnstrəlsɪ /

noun

1. the art of a minstrel
2. the poems, music, or songs of a minstrel
3. a troupe of minstrels

Word History and Origins

Origin of minstrelsy¹

1275–1325; Middle English minstralcie (< Anglo-French menestralsie ) < Anglo-Latin ministralcia, menestralcia. See minstrel, -cy

Example Sentences

Or, as Dr. Stacey Patton sums up Gunn’s performance in a scathing NewsOne column, a party to “modern-day minstrelsy.”

From Salon

As an undergraduate in the late 1980s at Wesleyan University, where he came out as gay and was one of the few Black students, he photographed himself in a blond wig and whiteface, flipping old machismo and minstrelsy tropes that still attached to Blackness.

From New York Times

“For example, the ‘Amistad’ story happened exactly at the time when minstrelsy was starting to become the principal form of entertainment,” Davis says.

From Seattle Times

The banjo became the backbone of American roots music and culture through minstrelsy — white America's most popular form of entertainment in the early 1800s – in which white performers blackened their faces and performed as exaggerated versions of enslaved Africans on plantations, cementing a grotesque caricature of Black people in white American society.

From Salon

In a modern form of minstrelsy, these white musicians safely provided ‘Black’ music to white audiences.”

From Salon