The Superhero's Racial Rubix Cube

[shuah]

First off, I would like to encourage any non-Caucasian Blu-Ray Forum members to put in their two cents on this thread, being that I'm a white male and I would like to hear some other opinions.
With that said, is anybody else a little annoyed at the recent skin color switcheroos that have been happening in Superhero movies? It isn't willy-nilly-allovertheplace, but it's enough to be noticeable and, frankly, I find it condescending to non-white ethnicities.

Alicia Masters is black, in the Fantastic Four movies. Nick Fury is black at the end of Iron Man and in the animated Avengers movie. Maverik is Asian in the new Wolverine picture.
I wouldn't have a problem with it, if these characters weren't white in the comics. And I don't have a problem with the changes just because it makes the movies less like the source material. There have been changes in comic book movies that I enjoyed; I liked the end of Watchmen (the movie) a little better than the end of Watchmen (the comic).

But when you change the ethnicity of a character, in order to diversify a cast, doesn't it condescend to the people of those races that you're trying to appeal to? It's a little too Superfriends style for this day and age, isn't it? Maybe I'm just being touchy, but I think this is coming from the same misguidedness that brought us the awful, insulting pander-characters, Black Vulcan, Apache Chief, El Dorado and Samurai.

On top of that, I find the way they cast ethnicities a bit ethically disappointing, as well. IE: Halley Berry as Storm.
It's like a bunch of blond-haired studio execs were talking to the casting director. "Storm's from Africa, right? So, she's Black, then? Ok. What about Halley Berry? She's a pretty big name, right now."

Not only did they pick Halley Berry, as if to say that Black = African (last I knew, "Black" meant you were a person of African descent that wasn't born in Africa) It's like they not only didn't pick an actress that was African. They didn't even bother picking one that was believably African. Halley Berry is mixed, obviously so, and doesn't even look believably Egyptian. It's as if the casting director didn't even care and took for granted that "brown is brown" and any actress of believable descent would be believable as a native African. I remember this being what bothered me the most about the X-Men movie, when I first saw it.

Then, in the second and third X-Movies, they don't even bother making Colossus Russian, as if "white is white". If I were Russian, that would piss me off a little bit. I mean, who's to say that Nationality matters less to people than race? Irish people are proud to be Irish. French people have a pride in their heritage. So, why ignore the nationality of a character who is white and mess around with the actual color of another?

I guess I just think Hollywood is really out of touch and it's only going to be a little while before they start offending their audiences, at large, just by trying to satisfy them.