Perfectly acceptable at the time ie. Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer was the biggest movie of the era.
> Perfectly acceptable at the time… <
Yes. Everyone must be judged within context of their times. Here’s an example conservatives might want to share with their liberal acquaintances.
Martin Luther King was a great man. He patiently tried to heal the racial device. But he thought that homosexuality was a mental disorder. And he advised homosexuals to see a psychiatrist.
That kind of thinking just won’t fly today. So should MLK be cancelled, and be erased from history? Or should he be judged within the context of his times?
It might have even been beneficial in those days, when majority audiences may not have been receptive to black characters and actors at once-black characters but white actors was the way.
RE: Al Jolson in bygone era....
I am probably the biggest Jolson fan here. Lost count of the cds but believe I have 99.9% of the songs including earliest ones. And books and the dvds. Opera singers used to admire his voice.
Note: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra among many others had blackface stage appearances. Sinatra: “We were wrong but at the time we didn’t know we were hurting anybody.”