TLDR: This argument is dumb and I hate you all for pulling me into it.
Race swapping has occurred for as long as race has been a social construct - For essentially 350 years, Othello was played almost entirely by white men. Black face is a thing... because it exists. White people have played native American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. characters in film for as long as movies have been made. Racially/ethnically ambiguous men such as Vin Diesel have made a career out of playing different races.
Long before that, gender swapping occurred consistently in theaters, and both male and female characters were almost always played by men. Indeed, gender swapping has been an integral part of a number of plays, particularly during the Renaissance. Shakespeare explored this humorously, and for emotional impact on and off during his career, most notably in As You Like It and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The most famous deliberate race swapping in a movie happened nearly 70 fucking years ago - West Side Story. Up until about a decade ago, it was shown in school for the purpose of discussing why race swapping of characters is interesting, particularly from a literary/cultural perspective.
And then high schools gave up on teaching Shakespeare, almost entirely, outside of a few freshman English classes and, out went West Side Story.
A couple of years after that, Disney, and some other studios began to take a hard look at their practices and realized that they really weren't doing a good job of "breaking the mold" in a variety of ways.
And so they did some original stories involving diverse characters - sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
They also went back, particularly with this live action craze, and made some of their original characters more diverse.
Did they overcorrect some? Probably, yeah. All things are a pendulum.
But there was a reason for that overcorrection, and there were good intentioned purposes behind it.
Before Disney, Marvel and DC have been playing with "race swapped characters" in the comics since at least the late 60s, early 70s. This was largely a reaction to the caricatures of non-white characters in comics of the Golden Age, particularly as a form of propaganda during the WWII era.
What we are seeing now is an overreaction by the right to this overcorrection by studios/companies. It's been going on for about a decade, now, and has some pretty deep roots in how well received the new Star Wars movies were, and by who. I could write a dissertation length essay on how that particularly fandom fucked things up royally.
My guess is that the right is pushing this too much for the public's taste at the moment, just as the left probably was for awhile as well. I'm curious to see how this plays out, however, as right now the right continues to dominate the digital propaganda sphere - so I could definitely be wrong about how things play out.
