True marketing genius. Pretended to be black and used hip hop culture to get his foot in the door then dropped the act once he was in and became a multi millionaire A lister.
While you are correct about that, I would say the timeline is significant - Wahlberg shook off his White rapper image over a period of years. I would say it wasn't until Boogie Nights in 1997 when he finally "arrived" in Hollywood, and was proven to have depth and range as an actor [or the movie FEAR, the year before, but Boogie Nights confirmed it].
Also, the full transition was even a bit longer than that - for example, I don't see a MarkyMarkVEVO on YouTube [not last I checked, although that was a while ago]. The 1991 song "Good Vibrations", while available on YouTube by a bootleg channel, is not on YouTube officially.
Mark Wahlberg also asked for a pardon for his crime against a Vietnamese man, from around 1988, and was denied the pardon. It went viral, and a lot of people considered Wahlberg to be a bad person based on this crime that he committed while he was 16 years old].
So yes, there has been a process of Wahlberg shaking off his former image [while only keeping one aspect of his brand - his physique and looks], but the process has been one that has been decades in the making, IMO.
