The difference between black make-up and blackface

I'm probably tempting fate and courting disaster here by even thinking about blogging on this subject, but, hey, so few people actually read it...
On a day to day basis, I consider myself pretty colour-blind as regards race, but some instances of ultra-political-correctness do still get my goat. One such issue is that of the use of "blackface" in live theatre, an issue that surfaces in the media from time to time, the latest being an article by Aria Umezawa in the Globe.
Ms. Umezawa is the outspoken founding member and artistic director of Opera Five, which specializes in making opera accessible to the non-opera-loving masses, through combining opera with multi-media presentations, and through their YouTube series "Opera Cheats", among other things. She claims to be half-Japanese and half-Irish-Italian, and is certainly whiter than me. Still, she feels the need to weigh in on the worthy Metropolitan Opera's recent decision to break with the long tradition of using white singers in what is almost always described as "blackface" to portray the title character in Verdi's popular opera Otello.
What blackface actually is is an old parodic theatrical tradition of exaggerated make-up used to represent a stereotypical black people for entertainment purposes, particularly the once popular "minstrel shows" of singing, dancing and comic skits. Blackface was popularized in the USA and Britain in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, and petered out in the 1960s, largely thanks to the civil right movement. Its very stereotypical and archetypical nature makes it a racist phenomenon, and something to be discouraged, as indeed it has been in the last 50-odd years, although several commentator have also pointed out that the tradition was also largely responsible for popularizing black culture to the white masses at a time when little or no dissemination of African-American culture and art was otherwise possible.
However, what we are talking about in presentations of works like Otello and Shakespeare's original play Othello is not blackface in its deliberately camp and stereotypical manifestation, but stage make-up used in good faith to more convincingly portray a white actor as a black character. Personally, I don't see the problem in doing this, any more than I have a problems with a male actor using make-up to portray a woman (or a woman to portray a man), or to portray a burn victim, or a deformity like John Merrick's, or an old person, etc, etc.
Sure, if the theatre or opera company has a black person who is capable of performing the role, that is fine too, although many black actors do not like the stereotyping inherent in older works of art like Othello and prefer to avoid such roles. Likewise, many theatre companies deliberately employ a colour-blind casting approach, and may deliberately use white actors (sans make-up) to play black roles, and - more commonly - vice versa. I am absolutely fine with that too, and it can sometimes make for an interesting and thought-provoking performance (a good example of this is the current multi-racial Stratford Festival production of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost).
Of course, what Ms. Umezawa calls "whitewashing" - deliberately casting a white performer in a black role where black alternative performers who are up to the job are available and interested in the role - is institutionalized racism. But the title role in this case of Verdi's Otello is a particularly onerous and challenging one, and The Met claim, reasonably, that their choice of the top Latvian tenor Alexandrs Antonenko is based on artistic merit only. To me, this does not constitute whitewashing. On the other hand, their choice of not using black make-up (and I deliberately avoid the use of the incendiary word "blackface" here) is a choice made out of political correctness, and not an artistic one, although laudable enough in itself as an attempt to distance themselves from some of the racist enormities of yesteryear. But why Ms. Umezawa feels the need to make complaints, even given these facts, is a mystery to me.
In the same way, I was equally annoyed by middle-aged white man J. Kelly Nestruck's vitriolic display of righteous indignation over a play about black Montreal hockey hero P.K. Subban by a small Quebec theatre company earlier this year, in what he describes as a "racist portrayal". Subban is black (that is the point of the play), and for a small theatre company with no black members able to play the part, what are they to do? To portray him as white would lose a large point of the play and minimize the difficulties he had growing up and ultimately excelling in what is very much a white man's sport.
I am by nature a pretty easy-going, thoughtful and politically-correct kind of guy. But sometimes this kind of misplaced, holier-than-thou self-righteousness really aggravates me. It is interesting that many black actors, comedians, etc, have come out in defence of just the kind of thing that these white liberals are objecting to (some examples are actually mentioned in the last-mentioned article). It is necessary to distinguish between offensive stereotyping played for laughs, and an actor justifiably wearing some stage make-up.