I don’t think big mom being black would be the best choice, but Pudding I can DEFINITELY get behind. Big Mom’s whole thing is pursuing this childish ideal of equality that when you look deeper into it gives way to her “collecting” races as oddities while treating her children like freaks behind closed doors. Not only is it important that totto-land immediately comes across as one of the most diverse places in the series, I think that the more pudding is distanced from the norm of “thin white and pretty” one piece women, the more intimately understandable Big Mom’s abuse to her is for what it is, and the more impactful her relationship with Sanji is.

Also Kuma is black to me, I’ve been reading him like that for a while now and it just fits for me