First of all, sorry for the wall of text. I'm out after this one until someone else says something profoundly stupid. But on the subject of skin color and fictional characters, I present the case for an all-white James Bond, 007.
I'm very familiar with the film character, having seen all of the official EON Productions entries as well as 1967's
Casino Royale and Kevin McClory's
Thunderball remake,
Never Say Never Again. On the other hand, I have not read all of Fleming's novels; in fact, I've only read most of
Casino Royale, which I couldn't enjoy simply because of Fleming's literary style.
So far, of course, Bond has exclusively been played on film by a white male, usually from the British Isles, although the
Casino Royale spoof ends with everyone in the film getting to play James Bond, even women. (I don't recall if there were any minority men at that point in that disaster of a movie.) Fleming's novels reportedly don't give any indication to Bond's racial identity, although later on in the series he's confirmed to have Scottish ancestry.
The author of this
Quora answer makes his case for a white Bond on the basis that, in the 1950s in the real world, England unfortunately wouldn't have dared or wouldn't have been able to have a black man operate as 007 does in Fleming's novels. With possibly a few exceptions I'm not aware of, this author could be correct. In conclusion he writes, "I think that people who demand a more diverse casting of James Bond simply don’t know what they’re talking about."
But this all presumes that the films are direct, faithful adaptations of the novels themselves. Some have come close, mostly those made in the early 1960s, but that simply hasn't been the case for this series in many, many years. Even 2006's
Casino Royale, the first Fleming adaptation in nearly 20 years, took great liberties with the source novel. But of great importance is the fact that it wasn't set in 1954: it was set in the modern day, in an era in which a man or woman regardless of skin color can have a career in espionage; we've seen both black men and women as spies in recent Bond films with no backlash from outspoken fans.
The 007 of the movies is no longer Ian Fleming's literary character and he hasn't been for decades, if ever. Sean Connery was so unlike the character that at first Fleming hated his casting, but eventually grew fond of his portrayal and added elements of Connery's background to the literary Bond's. And can anyone who's ever seen the Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan films say that their iterations were much like the character Fleming wrote?
Therefore the importance of race in regards to the literary James Bond 007 doesn't really pertain to the cinematic version. The only way I can see the "black people weren't spies for Britain" argument hold water is if anyone ever adapted a Fleming novel as it was written, i.e. 1950s setting. But as long as 007 films continue as they've been made since at least 1971, there is no credible case for why the Bond of the movies
must be white.
For that matter, the same is true of any fictional character for which race is not a factor. This includes the Little Mermaid, who like 007, exists cinematically as a different character than the literary original. The people getting hung up on how she looks in the previous Disney films and TV series are missing the point: her race and appearance weren't even aspects of her "identity" in those stories. Her identity was a mermaid, not a "white, red-haired mermaid." The story still works just the same if she's black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or even a white girl with golden hair.
If you're that mad with those unimportant visual changes to the character then just go enjoy the versions you like. No one is taking them away, and as I said in another comment, they will continue to exist in harmony with this new version of the character and film.
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