Context matters, nothing is pure black/and white, it's all grayscale. We cannot look at everything through the lens of our modern world, and the current political environment. Especially history.
Actually, yes, we can.
“What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? . . . You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’?”
This quote is from James Baldwin, a major civil rights pioneer, in a documentary from the 80s. James Baldwin was born in 1924. Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer", for reference, came out in 1927. So in the years when James Baldwin was growing up, the person you're touting as a progressive, was a household name, and his film career went on into James' teen and young adult years, in which Jolson was performing in blackface.
Traditionally, blackface performances were caricatures, specific racial stereotypes that have been perpetuated to this day, though they've changed and evolved. I remember a stream I watched at one point where a black creator was going through films, tv, and memes pointing out the characters and images we're seeing and sharing today who are unironically just the same caricatures as those shown in the old minstrel shows. We're so far removed from their original contexts that we don't understand why they are that, but that makes it worse, because it means we're participating in and perpetuating a racist culture that we don't undestand.
edit: I wanted to add, as an example that many here might understand, there's a specific caracature that we use pretty often in making adult games. The black best friend, he's usually either an uncle tom, a sambo, or a jim crow. Which he is depends on how the author depicts this black best friend as not being a threat to the MC (NTR is bad mmkay). If he's mostly asexual, and generally not an idiot, he's probably an uncle tom. If he's an idiot, but mostly asexual, he's a sambo. If he's shown as interested in sex, but too much of an idiot to ever get it, he's a jim crow. And these aren't things the authors are clearly deciding to do, as I said before, we're participating and perpetuating racism without understanding we're doing it. On the opposite end, the Mandingo is also very common.
Bringing this all back to Harem Hotel, what makes this game so good is how it presents exactly that. The scene during the Jia wedding event, where Lin and MC are in the tourist town and two foreigners walk up to Lin and harass her, is unironically how white people treat black and indigenous people today. How many times have you heard a white person call a person of color "eloquent"? Have you ever noticed how much white people just wanna touch black and indigenous people's hair?
What Harem Hotel does is give us a way to conceptualize that while we tend to look back at history and see things as having gotten better, the reality is, it was never ok, and the people suffering haven't stopped suffering, and this slow progression isn't justifiable in any way.