Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer: 

This week we have discussed several black performers who continued to shape their blues performance style in the 1940s in an overt attempt to appeal to white audiences. Some of those performance styles can be linked to the lingering conventions of black-face minstrelsy. Is it fair to criticize performers from that era who continued to perform using those conventions? Do some black performers today still shape their performance styles to appeal to white audiences in a way that might perpetuate negative racial stereotypes? If so, is it fair to criticize those performers for that?