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This chapter focuses on the interest in the real as a commercial device. This interest made it possible to break mainstream showbusiness's color barrier. The real enticed white audiences because realism was in vogue. For the educated white bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, historian T. J. Jackson Lears contends, “authentic experience of any sort seemed ever more elusive; life seemed increasingly confined to the airless parlor of material comfort and moral complacency. Many yearned to smash the glass and breathe freely—to experience ‘real life’ in all its intensity.” Being quite cognizant of this fact, black performers sought to contrast their “realness” with white imitation. White minstrelsy's “seeming counterfeit,” Eric Lott's coinage describing a “contradictory popular construction that was not so much true or false as more or less pleasurable or politically efficacious in the culture that braced it,” was dissolving.
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