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If it's bad to use white actors for black (or other colored) roles then it's bad for black actors to do white roles. If it's okay to do those switches then it's okay for all. Forget colors it shouldn't matter.
Having said that, Disney just did the Ariel thing ffor the "look at us being sooooo progressive, please give us your money for this utterly shit movie" instead of trying to just make a great movie
But Ariel wasn't white. She was a fish person. So they were free to do whatever.
Real mermaids rise up
Obligatory
Careful, don't bring logic into this or offended white people might collectively ignore you entirely and keep complaining.
A big issue here, especially with the MCU stuff, is that it's not a skin color thing with those changes. They updated the whole character in order to make them into races that are more friendly to China. They've done this repeatedly and stripped identities and character traits from characters over and over again.
Every single Romani character that's appeared in an MCU movie has had their heritage removed and replaced with generic white. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are good examples (since they're the ones in the meme) but I don't see any way that Robert Downey Jr is going to be able to do the complicated Romani backstory of Dr Doom very well.
I agree that Ariel was swapped for marketing reasons (and arguably specifically to cause outrage and get people talking) Ariel doesn't have a racial heritage that plays into her life and identity... She's a mermaid from the sea... Not a member of a group with a large history of being discriminated against.
Maybe that's for the best? It's a bit weird that MCU went so big on Romani people in specific. That said unless a Romani person identifies themselves, you're going to have trouble picking them out of a crowd. They are as diverse as the regions they've traveled through.
It's definitely a cynical move by Disney no matter how you slice it.
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"If you think we're super woke, you go support the movie. We get money."
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"If you hate it (because we thought a superficial change would cover the fact we barely tried), it's because you're a nasty racist bigotface, your opinion is disregarded, galvanizes our first crowd into giving us more money, and angry actually-racist bloggers probably hate-watch it while advertising it for free. We get money."
Ain't the culture wars grand (if you're selling to both sides like a proper arms dealer)? :D
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I personally think it isn't wise to use an actor of any race in substitute of another, if that character's race is part of the story. The only reason I could think of to change the character's race, gender, status, etc. would perhaps be to tell a different story, but then it should be renamed and be a different story. But if a character's race, gender, status, etc. is tied to that character's story, then it shouldn't be discarded frivolously.
From what I see, I feel that a lot of the disconnect is based on whether people find an attribute (in this case, race) important or not as part of the character's story.
I feel I half agree with you. The other half of me thinks, there's a lot of things we change for an actor acting a character. After all, it's an actor, playing a character. Someone called Ben can play a guy called John; your grumpiest aunt can play a sweet grandma; often we have actors in their 30s and 40s playing ternagers and 20s; and men playing women even used to be a thing.
I think you have a good point, but I also think it's okay to have an acceptable disconnect of, this is people acting out a story, not the real thing happening in front of me.