I’d argue (having grown up in a region where lawn jockeys were fairly common among the wealthier whites) that while we think of them as offensive today, and many whites supposedly diid not think they were offensive back then, they’ve always been offensive to people of color. And even back then, any white person with a brain understood that putting one on your lawn was sending a subtle or not so subtle message that Black people needed to stay “in their place,” that is, as servants.
They got painted white to try to avoid unwanted attention, generally by the 1970s.
I am saying something else, I am saying that the evidence, in the form of quite a number of years of academic research, shows a very clear relationship between racism and colonialism and this sort of thing., It’s not just saying this happened, and this happened, so they must be related. It’s saying that we can see how these practices reinforce cultural hegemony, are deliberate, and operate often without (I’ll give you that) the conscious awareness of everyone participating. No, grandma may not associate a piece of jewelry with oppressing the Hottentots or whatever, but the Foreign Office or whatever certainly knows that getting people to associate imperialism with “getting nice things from those fascinating natives” helps oil the machinery.l
Opinions of course will differ, and of course individual artists may do whatever, who knows? But speaking in terms of Western culture at large, I would argue, along with many others, that yes, this stuff was part of the entire full-court press of cultural hegemony, and quite deliberately so. You can of course argue that such associations are accidental, but I think that given how often and consistently the two things align, Occam’s Razor suggests the simpler explanation.