“But I don’t think it’s necessarily antiwoke to tell an all-white story or to relegate nonwhite characters to the margins, if that’s where they fit the creative intentions.”
—Former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar in the paper’s “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights.'”
Oh, well that’s really big of the critic, don’t you think? How generous of him! He is willing to concede that a director might still be regarded as a good person if he or she doesn’t cast actors “of color” (you know, like the critic) to play characters written as white, visualized by the playwright as white, in a story obviously about white people!
Yes, this fatuous, offensive statement came late in an essay that was already obnoxious, with the biased and reductive headline, “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights’.” [Gift link!] The Post post was defending, sort-of -but- not-really, Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” film, in which Heathcliffe, Emily Bronte’s hormonal romantic anti-hero, is played…
…by a white actor. Never mind that previous film adaptations have cast Heathcliff as white, notably the classic starring Lawrence Olivier in the role, probably because he was the best actor alive at the time.
Yes, it is true that the ethnicity of Heathcliff has always been a matter of debate: with Bronte describing him as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy,” and a “little Lascar,” a term for South Asian sailors. The idea is that he is an outsider and at the bottom of the social ladder; that certainly would justify casting a black, Indian or other non-white actor, but certainly doesn’t mean he has to be played that way. (I would not think that casting Heathcliff as Swedish would work, but you never know: I could see one of the Skarsgaard boys pulling it off.)
Ethics Alarms 
Is there not a point at which the distraction is too high a hurdle? I can accept that Captain America and the Dread Pirate Roberts are positions to be filled, not particular people, but if Henry VIII is cast as a black lesbian …. not sure that production is going to hold my attention.
I know I live in my own bubble, and my biggest windows into the movie industry comes from Ethics Alarms, Critical Drinker, and some Catholic movie critics. But I’ve largely been turned off to most movies. I see trailers and am uninterested. I read (or hear) reviews and feel fully justified in not watching. I hear about how AI is going to destroy the industry, and I frankly can’t care that much. The entire industry feels pretty stale, and the only innovation seems to be in taking classic stories and changing the men into powerless fops, women into girl-bosses, and whites into people of color.
I have something of a similar complaint in the SF/Fantasy realm, where once there was a heyday of creative, inventive, captivating stories that were written for the sake of the story and the characters involved. Nowadays, there is a glut of work, and most of it is middling, and it makes me wonder if the creativity has been tapped out. Movies, books, TV shows — have we exhausted our ability to be innovative, and now there is nothing new under the sun?