@brionon
In Shakespear's day, a white actor blacking up was a justifiable response to scarcity - of black people *at all*, let alone actors (what's the standard percentage of the population, I wonder?), let alone actors or male-lead calibre (a percentage of the previous percentage).
Blacking up in the present day, with our present ethnic mix, implies hiring a white actor where perfectly good BME/Moroccan/other North African/Arab* actors are available for hire.
So it's not the application of makeup to a face which is a racist act, it is the discrimination at the casting of the production which would be racist.
* Arguably, the word 'Moor' refers to the Almoravid/Almohad cultures, who left their architectural stamp on the Iberian peninsular but were more Arabic than sub-Saharan.
B&WMS is something I dimly recall from childhood. Never really understood what it was supposedly 'celebrating'. I wonder if minstrels represent the time immediately post emancipation when, okay, they were free… yet no-one would hire them? They owned no tools, even if they possessed skills, had no capital to set up a business, so their only resort was song and dance?
Literally having to sing for ones supper must be a grim existence and hardly something to celebrate. It is anyones' guess whether it was hard to find 40-odd dancers of the appropriate ethnicity, in the 60s-70s or whether they were available but would have been incensed at the suggestion of performing those specific songs and dances.
In other AB debates, we sometimes express worry about childhood indoctrination and I wonder what insidious effects this show might have had on young minds, even if exposure was limited to the few minutes before the credits. Even Morecombe and Wise used Al Jolson jestures, years after B&WMS was canned.
When the caricature (of an entire ethnicity, not a specific individual) is firmly embedded in the mind, years before you meet such people in real life, it requires mental effort to avoid conflating their attributes with those of the caricature. Lumping the new acquaintance in with the crude stereotype is just laziness.