Brandinho
deng xiaoping gang
One of the big pitfalls of trying to increase representation in such a lazy way is that it sends a subtle but insidious message that there's nothing for that group to be proud of. It's kind of like how you'll see these insane Afrocentrists who argue that Mozart was black or that most of the Egyptian pharaohs were black. Why not teach a little black kid about Mansa Musa and how much of a badass he was? The richest man in history was a sub-Saharan African. Surely that will inspire more people than lying to them and waiting until they inevitably realize that Ramesses II was a ginger, Cleopatra was Greek and swarthy isn't a synonym for black.
That's also a really good point about people of mixed ethnicity having even less representation because of how reluctant anybody seems to be to acknowledge that they don't have to fit in one simple category. I'm sure that a lot of it stems from the cultural impact of the one drop rule, but it's really taken on a life of its own with the way we've circled back around to identity politics being the big thing. The problem is that identity politics involve groups of people, but one's own identity should never be subject to the opinion of anybody but themselves.
It's really hard to tell how much of this nonsense is well intentioned but misguided and how much of this is deliberately meant to undermine and antagonize people. I want more characters of every physical description, but they need to be authentic. It's the difference between writing an interesting play about the plight of a fat girl who comes from a family of fat women and is trying to break the cycle versus sticking one 200+ pound woman in an Old Navy commercial to shake for a few seconds alongside the dozens of real models that they hired.
