Seemingly harmless entertainment can normalize grotesque caricature

Evidence

It was, on the one hand, harmless fun: men in silly clothes and garish makeup inventing a kind of sketch-comedy variety show. But the audience’s prolonged exposure to these images normalized their intended hideousness. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Utopian desire can invest a comic grotesque body without ironic distance — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3734; Novelty converts from absurd to accepted through repeated exposure — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 17