One thing I absolutely cannot stand is when people go “well if you can turn a white character black then we should be able to turn black characters white too.”
That argument ignores history so badly it’s insane.
White characters have never lacked representation. White people have never lacked the ability to see themselves as the hero, the love interest, the princess, the chosen one, the powerful one, the beautiful one. That has BEEN the default for decades. Especially in America, whiteness was treated as the standard for beauty, desirability, innocence, femininity, heroism, everything.
POC characters did not get that.
Black people were excluded from stories, erased from stories, stereotyped in stories, killed off in stories, treated as side characters in stories. And when black creators DID make space for themselves, those characters still got treated horribly half the time.
So no, these situations are not equal.
Turning traditionally white characters black is not “taking representation away.” White audiences still have thousands upon thousands of white characters across every genre imaginable. Y’all have endless options for your imagination already because the entire industry was built around you from the start.
Meanwhile POC fans had to fight just to be included at all.
So yes. Let black girls be Ariel. Let Cinderella be black. Let Sleeping Beauty be black. Let superheroes be black. Let iconic male characters be black too. Let little black kids grow up seeing themselves as magical, desired, heroic, soft, powerful, complicated, loved.
Representation is not oppression.
And honestly? If seeing one black version of a character feels threatening to you when whiteness has dominated media forever, maybe ask yourself why that bothers you so much.
