On Minstrel Shows and Tin Pan Alley

-The article I am responding to-

I do think it's especially interesting the way you focused on the Minstrel Shows, as it shows something very important, namely that popular culture has a way of not only reflecting our biases but setting them in stone in the popular culture, hence why the minstrel-show stereotypes became real-life stereotypes thanks to their omniprescence.

And that's also, unfortunately, how Uncle Tom came to be known as a slur, because of its use in the many minstrel-show knock-offs of the book, which were so terrible that the book's author had to be informed of the plot of one of these "retellings" .

I think that we have a subtler; more insidious form of this today with the thuggish; criminal way minorities are portrayed on shows like Law and Order or CSI. That's why I think the most dangerous racial slur of modern times is not any n-word, w-word or s- word, but rather the phrase "those people". Because whenever people say that a law is supposed to protect us from "those people", the examples they tend to point to suspiciously invoke a crapton of racial stereotypes.