In 1967, when the BBC was faced with a petition by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination requesting an end to the televised variety program the Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978), producers at the BBC, the press, and audience members collectively argued that the historic presence of minstrelsy in Britain rendered the practice of blacking up harmless. This article uses critical race theory as a useful framework for unpacking defenses that hinged on both the color blindness of white British audiences and the simultaneous existence of wider customs of blacking up within British television and film. I examine a range of “screen culture” from the 1920s to the 1970s, including feature films, home movies, newsreels, and television, that provide evidence of the existence of blackface as a type of racialized custom in British entertainment throughout this period. Efforts by organizations such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, black press publications like Flamingo, and audiences of color to name blacking up and minstrelsy as racist in the late 1960s were met by fierce resistance from majority white audiences and producers, who denied their authority to do so. Concepts of color blindness or “racial innocence” thus become a useful means of examining, first, the wide-ranging existence of blacking-up practices within British screen culture; second, a broad reluctance by producers and the majority of audiences to identify this as racist; and third, the exceptional role that race played in characterizations of white audiences that were otherwise seen as historically fragile and impressionable in the face of screen content.

中文翻译：

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“节目与种族无关”：风俗、银幕文化和黑白吟游诗人秀

1967 年，当 BBC 面临反对种族歧视运动的请愿书，要求结束电视综艺节目时，黑白吟游诗人秀（1958-1978 年），BBC 的制作人、媒体和观众集体认为，英国吟游诗人的历史存在使得涂黑的做法无害。本文使用批判种族理论作为一个有用的框架来解开防御，这种防御取决于英国白人观众的色盲和英国电视和电影中同时存在的更广泛的黑化习俗。我研究了从 1920 年代到 1970 年代的一系列“银幕文化”，包括故事片、家庭电影、新闻短片和电视，它们提供了黑脸作为这一时期英国娱乐中一种种族化习俗存在的证据。反对种族歧视运动、黑人新闻出版物等组织的努力火烈鸟，在 1960 年代后期，有色人种的观众将黑人和吟游诗人称为种族主义者，遭到了大多数白人观众和制片人的强烈抵制，他们否认了他们这样做的权力。因此，色盲或“种族纯真”的概念成为一种有用的手段，首先是检查英国电影文化中广泛存在的涂黑行为；其次，制片人和大多数观众普遍不愿将其视为种族主义；第三，种族在对白人观众的刻画中发挥的特殊作用，否则这些观众在面对银幕内容时被视为历史上脆弱和易受影响的。