I just caught The Scottsboro Boys on Broadway. This is the musical that frames its story in an ironic minstrel format and was recently protested by New York City's Freedom Party.

The protesters, who complained that the play reduced the tragic case of nine black young men who were wrongly convicted of raping two white women to "a Step n Fetchit comedic, minstrel exhibition," were missing the point. The minstrel format was being used as an indictment of whites' behavior during the Scottsboro episode, as well as an indictment of minstrel shows in general.

I was actually struck by something else about the minstrel part, seemingly innocent at first. Namely, the play's program provides an explanation of what a minstrel show was (that is, white men made up as blacks and engaging in dopey hijinks and dippy dialect), including its format, with the Interlocutor supervising exchanges between "end men" Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, and so on.

We hear much in our times about how this show or that music or this movie is recapitulating the minstrel show. And yet as I read the dutiful program notes, some questions came to me. How many people now living saw minstrel shows? They started in the 1820s and were largely extinct by the 1940s. Or: How many people today of any color know who Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones were? Or Dan Rice? Or how "Jump Jim Crow" went?

Important: My point is not that to the extent that anyone doesn't happen to know these things, it's a knock against them. These things are obscure points of history. In a way, we shouldn't expect a large number of people to know them, any more than we expect people to know who Lillian Russell was or to know how many daughters Eddie Cantor had.

Here's why those questions have stuck with me: If minstrelsy is so far in the past that it has to be taught as history, then what exactly do we mean when we condemn something a black entertainer does as bringing us back to minstrelsy? How can we be brought back to something most of us never saw and never will?

The problem with keeping the minstrel image alive as an object lesson is that it ends up meaning, basically, that black entertainers aren't allowed to smile big and be silly. I'm not sure that makes sense, and I'm not sure it's fair.

Take poor Tyler Perry. It seems as if it was 10 minutes ago that the mantra was, even if there were plenty of black movies, that wasn't good enough -- there weren't enough black people in the position to decide when and whether they would get made. Now we have Perry churning out plays, movies and television shows all year, every year -- but apparently this isn't good enough, either, because Perry's work isn't deep. Or more to the point, because his works don't seek the profundity of August Wilson or the sepia solemnity of The Cosby Show, they are "minstrel shows." The charge has been leveled and explored endlessly (here is a handy representation of how the argument goes).