What's So Bad about Blackface?

I assume that most have a prima facie suspicion of, if not outright negative attitude toward, cases of what I call actor-character race-mismatching film fictions—that is, films in which the race of an actor or actress does not match the race of the character he or she portrays. ¹ Even the most cursory of glances through the history of cinema reveals the practice of race-mismatching— whether as cinematic blackface or one of its racially other-colored cinematic kin (yellowface, redface, brownface)—present not only in cinema's infancy but also through its Golden Age all the way to the contemporary Hollywood era. Here is a brief list of salient examples:

Walter Long as Gus in Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915).

Rudolph Valentino as Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (George Melford, 1921).

Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto in Think Fast, Mr. Moto (Norman Foster, 1937).

Katherine Hepburn as Jade in Dragon Seed (Jack Conway and Harold S. Becquet, 1944).

Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata Salazar in Viva Zapata! (Elia Kazan, 1952).

Charlton Heston as Ramon Miguel Vargas in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958).

Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961).

Chuck Connors as Geronimo in Geronimo (Arnold Laven, 1962).

Telly Savalas as Pancho Villa in Pancho Villa (Eugenio Martin, 1972).

Robbie Benson as Billy Mills in Running Brave (D. S. Everett, 1983).

Fisher Stevens as Ben Jabituya in Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986).

Mizuo Peck as Sacagawea in Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006).

The question then is this: what (qua film fiction) is so bad about actor-character race-mismatching? That most of us think that something is prima facie wrong with race-mismatching I take to be obvious. Not so obvious, however, is to what other than intuition and sentiment (and the violations and affronts thereof) we could plausibly appeal to ground our thinking as much. In what follows, I show the question of the badness of actor-character race-mismatching to extend beyond the domain of the moral to the aesthetic and the epistemic. Building on the framework I have outlined elsewhere (Mag Uidhir 2012) to evaluate race-mismatching aesthetically, I claim that determining what, if anything, is in fact wrong with race-mismatching morally operatively depends on determining what, if anything, is in fact wrong with race-mismatching epistemically, such that, if there is nothing wrong with race-mismatching all epistemic things considered, then there is nothing wrong with race-mismatching all moral things considered. Of course, even though there may be nothing wrong with race-mismatching per se, we need not look too hard to find a host of standard race-mismatching film fictions in which there looks to be plenty wrongepistemically, aesthetically, and morally.