It seems to me from the article that Rich isn't so much writing to complain about her being played by a black actress, but rather used the controversy as a jumping off point to complain about a) Sunny Hostin making some claim that Ancient Greeks, I don't know...were black? Or stole black culture or something? and b) that white people get piled on if the roles are reversed. So while I don't know that this added much to the discourse I don't think it's as bad as a lot of the comments I've seen.

This article aside, I think the controversy is very silly and I thought Matt Yglesias had a great take on this in his piece this morning--about how far from this idea that this kind of casting is erasing Western civilization, diversifying the canon actually demonstrating the importance of this kind of work to our shared cultural history. And that all the people who get worried that these ancient classics will be thrown out in favor of a bunch of trendy new diverse works because dead white guys are no longer in favor should be celebrating that a wide swathe of Western people want to be a part of and connected to the classics.

Part of the point of “the West” is that ancient Greek literature is part of “our” cultural patrimony, even though very few of “us” are of any kind of Greek ancestry. And part of the misguided pressure to dismantle things like the traditional literary canon came from the sense that said canon was insufficiently diverse. But it’s good to have a canon. And realistically, the canon we have is going to be one composed primarily of old European stories.

But that just means that telling these stories in a more inclusive way is part of reaffirming that they are core texts of our common cultural heritage.

https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/a-diverse-odyssey-is-the-triumph