And, sure, anti-Black racism might be his prime motivation. But, just assuming it's so, when someone questions American appropriation of his own culture's literary traditions is ... it's frankly imperialist.
"Americans agree: Italian who questions American depictions of Italian cultural traditions is just a bigot"
Have a bit more charity.
Have a hypothesis and then do your best to falsify that. Give him all of the charity he needs to refute your guess that he's a bigot.
"So you say that there is a convention in Italian literature of depicting other-worldly beings as having freakishly white skin. Would you be ok with the Pinocchio reboot if the same African-descended actress portrayed the fairy, but were instead made up with freakishly white skin?"
If he doesn't refute your generous chances, then guess what? You found a bigot. Congratulations.
If everyone were more parsimonious about it, calling someone a racist or white supremacist or a Nazi would actually have some meaning again. At this point it's just coming to mean "This person disagrees with me and I don't like it".
Remember, these depictions are intended to be immersive. If some element reminds the watcher that they are watching a story, and they find it difficult to suspend their disbelief, they're not going to like it. That could mean an actor with clearly incorrect ancestry for the role.
For example, in the real world, a rural village of people whose ancestors have been in the same region for hundreds or thousands of years are going to look a lot alike. This is why Finns do not look like Khoisan. Everyone knows this. No one has a problem with this.
If your fantasy setting has human beings (or humanoid beings) living for generations together in a small rural village, and you just throw a bunch of different real-world ancestries in there, a Khoisan burgher and a Finnish tavern keeper, that's going to need some kind of explanation. Highlighting that as a problem isn't automagically racist. Maybe it's "magic world" and people there just have that kind of reproductive variability. Cool. Whatever it is, it needs a reason. But without that, it comes off as immersion-disrupting tokenism.
So, no, I don't think "focusing on race" is an automatic signifier of racism.
Am I?
Are you sure?
Can you quote me on that please?
The blue fairy is an important part of my culture, at least for me.
If someones rewrites it using all the power of a conglomerate like Disney, that puts at risk our shared culture and heritage.
For me she's gonna be a woman with blue air, for someone younger it will be a bald black woman, that has no direct representation in the society where I live.
I don't care who the actress is or what the color of her skin is, it's just not the "Fata Turchina", it's another character.
Simple as that.
Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.
What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?
