How to Use minstrelsy in a Sentence

minstrelsy

noun
  • From minstrelsy to cake walks to the chitlin circuit, the audience has always been crucial to the context.
    — Lauren Morrow september 9, Literary Hub, 9 Sep. 2025
  • The initial minstrelsy was obvious to the black patrons but not so obvious to others.
    — Adrienne Gibbs, Forbes, 10 Feb. 2023
  • How does the satirist work around the imposition, constructing her nasty, sarcastic world of minstrelsy and sharp tongues?
    — Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 7 Sep. 2024
  • And is black skin a mask that dictates behavior or does the mask free one to engage with the minstrelsy at the heart of American blackness?
    — Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2017
  • Is this content a new kind of collaborative performance art — or modern minstrelsy?
    — Cheri Lucas Rowlands, Longreads, 16 Dec. 2020
  • What better framing device for a racist travesty than minstrelsy, a theatrical form based on the grotesque caricature of blacks?
    — Andrea Simakis, cleveland, 16 Feb. 2020
  • As a result, some touchy old stereotypes, appropriated by whites and perverted as minstrelsy, are reclaimed and reframed.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2023
  • In one passage, Stevens is forcibly escorted by a dark-skinned soldier in the Pashtun hills, and his description of the man amounts to straight-up minstrelsy.
    — Robert Isenberg, Longreads, 26 Apr. 2022
  • Blackface, and minstrelsy, the performance tradition that featured it, bear a freight of white condescension and contempt.
    — Nr Editors, National Review, 26 Sep. 2019
  • Blackface minstrelsy is considered by some to be the first uniquely American form of entertainment.
    — Jesse J. Holland, The Seattle Times, 6 Feb. 2019
  • Without safeguards, this new minstrelsy will produce the inverse effect of the post-racial fallacy peddled during the Obama years.
    — Jason Parham, WIRED, 21 July 2023
  • Richard Wright accused her of minstrelsy, and the broader literary movement toward race-conscious social realism caused her books to slide into obscurity.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 17 Jan. 2020
  • In one scene, Jason reacts to the scandal of Gucci’s offensive cluelessness in marketing a sweater evocative of blackface minstrelsy.
    — Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 30 Aug. 2019
  • Blitzstein, sometimes at the risk of minstrelsy, absorbed the musical voice of the South, where the opera takes place, while writing symphonic music with the economy and directness of Copland.
    — Joshua Barone, New York Times, 5 June 2018
  • Some people reject the idea that blackface – a relic of minstrelsy, popular entertainment from the 19th century rooted in the mimicry and mocking of plantation slaves – is racist.
    — Monica Rhor, USA TODAY, 8 Feb. 2019
  • European blackface and American minstrelsy alike assume that performing blackness is a white birthright—that the stage is a white domain in which blacks are not allowed to tell their own stories, or even enjoy basic dignities.
    — Ayanna Thompson, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 Apr. 2021
  • Just as Harris is, among other things, satirizing minstrelsy, Barney is doing a slathering, filterless, singe-your-eyebrows-off send-up of the white lady who can do and say whatever and get away with it.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 11 Jan. 2024
  • As Kondabolu argues in a conversation with Whoopi Goldberg, there’s an undeniable element of minstrelsy in Apu.
    — Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 14 Apr. 2018
  • In this, Glover certainly isn’t the first artist to suggest that black popular entertainment can simultaneously work as minstrelsy, appeasing a racist system, and as a gas valve of joy for people crunched by that system.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 7 May 2018
  • All of that playing with current forms of popular culture meant that Klan violence confused observers—especially white Northerners, who were fans of minstrelsy, too, and quite ready to laugh at a black person who was the butt of a joke.
    — Rebecca Onion, Slate Magazine, 17 Aug. 2017
  • The excessive attention paid to Gunn’s poor performance is tinged with anti-Blackness—the systematic disdain for Black people and cultural forms—that has been likened to minstrelsy.
    — A.d. Carson, Scientific American, 4 Sep. 2024
  • Henry counted among her influences American minstrelsy, European clowning traditions, and her own collection of African masks.
    — News Desk, Artforum, 22 Oct. 2024
  • By the mid-1840s, blackface minstrelsy would become what many historians consider America’s first popular mass-entertainment form.
    — Mel Watkins, WSJ, 12 Apr. 2018
  • One of the most universal terms in comedy was created by Charlie Case, who pushed the Black entertainment needle away from racist minstrelsy and blackface during the vaudeville era by forging a new path of entertainment with storytelling.
    — Elise Brisco, USA TODAY, 2 July 2022
  • The production’s all-black cast performs this section in whiteface, employing ultrastylized buffoonish movement and diction that emphasize the characters’ stupidity and cravenness, with a nod to the dehumanizing stereotypes of minstrelsy.
    — Celia Wren, Washington Post, 15 Oct. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'minstrelsy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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