tinyE: Agreed. I hate it when the all white integrity of my comic books is sacrificed for something as silly as racial equality. XD
Breja: Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, being white and all, but I always found that kind of changes for the sake of "racial equality" actually rather insulting. It's like saying "no, no, you're black. You cannot like or identify with the white characters. Here, we'll make this one black for you." I never felt like I can't like a movie because the main character is a woman, or is black, or asian or gay or whatever. True equality mean that it doesn't matter. And forcing such changes on established characters to appeal to some demographic only reinforces the feeling that it does.
Because you look at it as an individual thing, while the issue is systemic : living in a society where the near-totality of role models (fictional heroes, but also social/moral/intellectual authorities, etc) represent a category from which you are excluded forever (being white, being of christian parents, being male, etc...). Which hammers the message of your inadequacy. It is indeed invisible when you belong to the dominant group, and have the occasional identification to a minority (and even so, heterosexuals don't often like to identify to "gay" love stories). but when the overwhelming message is that the heroes belong to "others", and that the ones who share your identity are an exception, this impacts not only the perception of one's own expected role in society, but also the other perceptions of it : the stereotype, the paradigm, of the "positive character", is defined by this artificial norm of over-representation. Because the issue is that representants of minority identities in such roles were much, much more rare than actual distribution (you can have 30% of "brown people" in a sociaty with just 5% of them being visible in medias). The issue used to be much greater a few decades ago, but marvel/dc
are digging up a mental universe from decades ago. If the bulk of fictional universe had been crafted nowadays, it would have been more honestly representative of US demography, and this is what is being updated.
Again, it's a matter of drops in the ocean. It makes no sense if you only consider the individual drop.
Oh, also, for all its tediousness, clumsiness and induced boredom, the cringeworthily heavy-handed "white man" movie illustrates this point well. So do studies/documentaries on black kids socialized in dominant "white" medias, and preferring by far white dolls and white action figures to identify to (cue to whitening creams sales, etc).
