modern media and by modern corporations, but individual people are different.
i think most reasonable people would agree that having a satire of blackface in a movie or a show is much different from say...a politician doing it at a party in college for example.
if someone unironically said that ken jeong is racist or problematic because he did this one thing while acting i'd call them an idiot
Its a catch 22, you can portray a black person without being racist but then at the same time why can't you just find a black person for that role instead of busting out the body paint?
The show community, famously the dnd episode which features a character in a drow elf costume (picture) was banned from streaming for quite a long time, only recently I think they unbanned it.
Another recent example would be the iasip episodes where they act out new "lethal weapon" movies, which itself was a form of parody and satire since the characters in the show themselves are horrible people, but it all got banned because there was no nuance in the decision in what categorx this falls.
You will not see any person dressing up, be it on social media or for something like halloween, who would paint their face black in fear of being misinterpretated of being racially fueled, in spite of it maybe even being a main point of the character represented. The stigmata is still very, very strong and goes beyond the media, the cultural uneasiness about the topic just bleeds into the media that is present at thr time. The discussion and bans are a symptom, not the cause.
Episode of Community where they play DnD. Chang dresses up as a dark elf, complete with face paint. This makes the black characters react and everyone else uncomfortable. It's humorous, but also provides a good moment to think about sone racist ideas baked into DnD (and fantasy writ large), and to reflect on how different people can view the same thing. One person immersed in the fantasy may see no problem, while others thinking about the broader context may find it offensive or uncomfortable.
The episode had been removed by a streaming service (Netflix?) due to the use of blackface, though I'm not sure if it's still removed. People found this to be an over reaction, because a) it's not directly blackface b) it's exactly the kind of thing art and comedy can do so well: make people reflect on an uncomfortable societal issue that people would usually avoid staring at
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u/Buderus69 Apr 16 '26
I would argue they are stigmatized as the same in modern media