Harry Connick Jr. Hates Blackface
The contestants, all medical professionals, are none too talented and, judging by their routine, racially oblivious. The audience cheers the jerking minstrels, clapping to the beat of a racial lampooning.
At 1:49 Harry Connick Jr. looks dumbfounded, and at 2:30 he gathers his wits and says
Man, if they turned up looking like that in the United States [. . .] They’d be like, “Hey, hey! There’s no more show.”
I think one of the legacies of the US’s horrific racial history is that Americans are clued in to the fact that racial miming has social meaning and that the social meaning blackface is something like “I enjoy black people because they are lolz and it’s funny when I clown like they do.”
Connick nails it when he says that Americans have
spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that we take it really to heart.