In the nineteenth century, minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment in the US. Their focus was racial caricature. The songs were in a fake form of black dialect, and many of them trivialized bad things that happened to black people. Some of them have survived in a cleaned-up form. “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the South, was originally “Dixie’s Land,” about a woman who “died for a man that broke her heart,” treating it as a bit of fun. (“But if you want to drive away sorrow, / Come and hear this song tomorrow!”) Other songs were still worse.

Minstrel shows featured performers in blackface. This didn’t mean simply black makeup; it was an intentional caricature, with dark makeup on the face and white lips. A well-known example is Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Even black performers were sometimes expected to wear blackface.

It bothers me that the term has been trivialized in modern use; we ought to remember just how degrading true blackface was (and occasionally still is). When I read that Laurence Olivier played Othello in “blackface,” it suggested a horrible image in my mind. The reality isn’t that much better, but it’s not blackface in the minstrel show sense. Shakespeare’s Othello was a “Moor,” a term that could refer to Turks, North Africans, or Arabs, whose skin wasn’t normally as dark as Olivier’s makeup. The play refers to Othello as black, but the English of Shakespeare’s time were mostly unacquainted with sub-Saharan Africans. A tradition of playing Othello in unhistorically dark makeup seems to have started in the nineteenth century. It was a badly misguided attempt at realism, but unlike blackface, it wasn’t an intentional caricature. An ethnically authentic portrayal would employ someone with roots in the Middle East or North Africa. Tony Shalhoub as Othello? Why not?

Then there’s “yellowface,” used to describe makeup to let white actors look East Asian. The word doesn’t show up in the dictionaries I’ve checked; it’s a recent coinage. But is there such a thing? May I suggest looking at some actual East Asians? Their skin isn’t yellow! I’ve even seen the term applied to a black-and-white movie. If any movies use yellow makeup to make actors look Asian, that’s a worse blunder than having Othello look as if his ancestors came from Uganda.

Words often get diluted in meaning over time, and there’s no stopping change. I just hope the change won’t make people think those minstrel shows were more innocent than they were.