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Is there a ready equivalent, in terms of tone and type of humour, about a white kid?
Genuine question. My first thought was that the reason it is a bit dodgy is that the focus is on the kid's blackness. Bear in mind there are two or three centuries in our history of cultural focus on the features of black faces and bodies as signifiers of both otherness and inferiority. One of the features that tended to be focused on and exaggerated in cartoons was big lips - another was the afro hair. We are used, as a culture, to viewing black bodies in a particular way and often that way is humorously.
At an individual level, the joke is not founded on any kind of racism and there is nothing inherently negative about it. It isn't hateful - it doesn't rely on any sense of cruelty or superiority. Our brains just go there - and we find it funny. But - it is a place we are culturally primed to go to. We notice the afro hair as a thing to focus on, because we are culturally primed to notice those features in a particular way.
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