>>211495746
My approach is always, "does changing the race change the character in a material way"?
Take, for example, Steve Rogers. The entire point of Steve Rogers is that he's a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned Ubermensch. He IS the Aryan ideal to a T. If he walked into a room Hitler would start getting all hot and bothered at the sight of him. At least until Rogers walked up to Hitler and decked him in the schnozz (or maybe still afterwards, I dunno, I don't kink shame). Because the entire point of Steve Rogers as a character is, "Hitler, if your super-man was real, he'd be on OUR side." Steve Rogers being a White man is actually important to the character, and so he should only be played by a White man.
Conversely, take, say, Inspector Javert from Les Misérables. The original novel doesn't describe him as any particular race, and nothing about his character really changes if you cast him as a Black man (say, Norm Lewis). It's perfectly believable that a Black man could become an inspector (not even chief of police or anything, just a chief inspector in one part of Paris) in 1830s France; Thomas-Alexandre Dumas managed to become an Army-general decades earlier, after all. Javert being Black doesn't change anything about how he thinks or acts and it wouldn't change how anyone around him thinks or acts towards him. So I don't see the harm.
