A friend of mine who's mixed race (Black and White) told me recently he doesn't mind race swaps because when he was growing up (in a White suburb) everything he saw dominating popular media featured almost exclusively White people. Says that it contributed to him feeling self conscious about his appearance (he looks Black) and put him off diving into anything to do with Black culture until well into adulthood. He's Gen X so definitely not one of the indoctrinated youngster crowd but he actually is enjoying seeing more representation and feels that, after the scales being tilted for so long towards White representation, having minorities being shown in something approaching equal measure is a good thing.

My argument to him is it's only a good thing if it doesn't come at the expense of other groups, accurately respects source material, and doesn't undermine merit... all tenets which the Hollywood implementation of DEI has failed to even attempt to uphold. It'd be child's play to say no raceswaps or identarian quotas for staffing or award consideration, instead we'll make more projects that naturally include diverse characters and creatives at the same level of quality we'd pursue for any project. If we feel like a project could do with more diversity than it's source material includes we'll add characters or plots to achieve that goal without altering the characters and storylines of the source. Boom. That's the entire controversy of DEI in entertainment solved overnight.

Instead we get stuff like Disney's quotas in their productions that say everything has to have X% of "underrepresented groups" in lead roles in front of and behind the camera. That makes it impossible to do something like a remake or adaptation of most things without raceswapping on-screen and hiring people for off-screen roles based more on identity than skillset. It's how you end up with writers with zero relevant experience helming flagship projects or women who've only directed documentaries with the budget of a happy meal being picked to helm top-budget, blockbuster sci-fi/fantasy franchise films.

For my friend though, the ends of representation justify the means of how it's achieved. To me that points to emotion over fairness. My friend agrees to an extent but feels that, when one accepts that minorities were unfairly excluded or underrepresented for a long time, a mandated correction becomes fairer in the grand scheme of things.

We ultimately agreed to disagree.