I’d hate to be thought of as a Nimby. How ghastly. But everyone has their line in the sand. Mine is a literal one, each summer, as blacked-up morris dancers enjoy my local beaches.

“Broadstairs is a bit like a Cornish fishing village perched on the side of Kent,” says Jo Tuffs, director of the town’s folk week, which began on Friday. By the end of the week, around 60,000 people will have passed through Broadstairs – population 25,000 – to enjoy the 54-year-old festival. Sixty acts, 50 events a day, 15,000 tickets. All this will generate an estimated £2.5m for the town.

Those in favour of the dancers' face-painting say they are dressing up as chimney sweeps or miners

If it’s your first visit, some of the acts may surprise you. There are 35 troupes of morris dancers attending, for example, and five of these perform in blackface. These are typically morris dancers from the “border morris” tradition – a style which came from the counties lining the English-Welsh border: Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. The origins of their use of blackface is a key argument in the clash between folk festival organisers and the critics who want to run the tradition out of town – as happened in 2016 when the Shrewsbury folk festival banned such dancers.

Those in favour say the face-painting has nothing to do with racism, the Black and White Minstrels or the lampooning of anyone of black and minority ethnic backgrounds. It is “history” or a “bit of fun”, they claim. They argue that the practice dates back centuries to well before the time morris dancers might have encountered blacked-up performers from overseas. They are dressing up as chimney sweeps or miners, a ploy that originated with agricultural workers trying to disguise themselves from their employers when they went out to sing and dance for a few extra pennies, when begging was illegal. It has nothing to do with race, they say. The chancellor, Sajid Javid, defended the practice in 2017, when he was communities secretary, saying he was “proud” of a group in Alvechurch in his Bromsgrove constituency. “They are as racist as I am,” he tweeted.

But former Green councillor and parliamentary candidate Ian Driver has been campaigning for years against the way Broadstairs folk week supports blacked-up morris dancers. He calls the festival “institutionally racist” and says the organisers are all white and the acts are 90% white even though there is African-Caribbean, Hispanic and Eastern European folk music which would better represent the local area.

Driver is convinced, based on evidence from a number of folk-dance scholars, that the practice was influenced and inspired by American minstrel shows from the Victorian era and their homegrown spin-offs. With the advent of the railways and music halls, styles of dancing, shows and skits spread easily across the ocean and from town to town. The race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust, has said that “supporters of the English folk tradition claim that blackfacing has nothing to do with race but their protestations certainly need to be contrasted with historical evidence and not reported as if this were undisputed fact”.

History is interesting. Origin stories fascinate people. All of these arguments are well-worn. But the more I listen to how critics and supporters slice, dice and muddle the evidence, the more tempted I am to say to hell with all of it. What relevance has origin in what is perceived as outwardly – often proudly – racist behaviour?

As a university lecturer, I used to teach a cultural studies class on race and identity to journalism students. It was a racially diverse group and included three or four undergraduates who educated me over our time together. I felt guilty watching the scales fall from my students’ eyes as we studied a number of current instances of blackface. They’d experienced racism. They were ready to debate whether white people wearing dreadlocks is a form of blacking up. They hadn’t necessarily thought deeply about how outdated modes of behaviour are still supported and validated in 21st-century Britain.

Blacking up has got all sorts of people into all sorts of trouble in recent times: Prada, Gucci, Vogue, Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande. Just last week Belgium’s Africa Museum held a party, for which it has since apologised, where guests wore colonial costumes, and some painted their faces black too. There’s an easy solution.

I don’t think the folk week organisers need to further examine whether performers’ use of blackface is or isn’t racist. They could simply move the festival’s identity on by banning the practice.

• Sophie Morris is a journalist and university lecturer. She writes about food, feminism and contemporary culture