It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.

I’m excited for Lee Daniels The Paperboy, which explores a wrongful conviction in Florida, and I was intrigued by this little tidbit from The Hollywood Reporter’s Cannes review of the movie: “Working from the well-received 1995 novel by Pete Dexter (Deadwood, Paris Trout), Daniels and Dexter have stuck closely to the book’s storyline in their adaptation but have amped up the racial element by making one major character and two secondary ones black rather than white. This doesn’t create any fundamental differences but does thicken the deck with extra tensions and innuendo.” The value of black directors isn’t just their authority to speak about race in certain ways, but the fact that they can present challenges to default whiteness in a way that white writers or directors may be unable to see. Default whiteness isn’t just lazy. It can flatten a story, or remove opportunities for tension and conversation. If white directors turn characters of color white because they want to cast a certain actor, they may end up with movies that don’t just look more generic but are less powerful.

One of the things that works best for me about House of Lies is something that’s coming up in subsequent episodes: its intense bluntness about race and the racism that persists at the highest levels of corporate America. And it was exciting to hear Don Cheadle, who plays high-powered consultant Marty Kaan, and Glynn Turman, who plays his father Jeremiah, talk about the show’s racial politics—and to promise more explorations of those themes if they’re lucky enough to get a second season.

“I want to commend the producers, showtime, for taking on the elephant in the room. This show addresses racial situation like no other show,” Glynn Turman said at the House of Lies panel during Showtime’s presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour today. “From the very opening scene, it’s smack dab in your face. It has never been presented so up front in the history of television. This is a bold step in treating a black man like a person with dimensions…The reason you know it is he is the guy he’s playing. That’s a racial attack. That’s an attack on racism in order to bring the walls down in itself. So at every turn, this show is addressing something that is a taboo.”

And he’s right. Reverse racebending happens occasionally, but it’s hard to imagine another show that would take a book written by a white guy about skulduggery in the world of business and cast a black man in the lead role, and do it without comment.

But it’s not simply a matter of making Kaan black instead of white. This wasn’t so much an issue in the first episode, but the show is very blunt about demonstrating racism and calling it out. Among the things coming down the pike: a client mistaking every white member of Marty’s team for Marty before turning to the black man in the room, and a very honest conversation between Marty and an African-American recruit. I asked Cheadle about whether we need humor that exposes racism more than we need the gentle humor of reconciliation.

“I think the best way, sometimes to deal with things of that nature that have so much gravitas is to come at it sideways,” he told me, saying that making people laugh can open up conversations that might not be possible otherwise. “If you can find a comedic way in, it’s more difficult to do and it’s dangerous to because the subject matter is so fraught with perils and traps. But you can sometimes make even more headway than if you confront it head on.”

And in the scrum afterwards I asked him what it was like playing a role that—in his capacity as father to Roscoe, who may be questioning his gender identity and his sexual orientation— both pushes back against images of woman-headed African-American households and the idea that black communities are homophobic, one of the more unfortunate and difficult political memes of the last few years.

“It’s a real unconventional take on all of those sorts of tropes,” he told me. “Is even there another show on television with a black male lead? Anywhere? The fact that it even exists and the fact that we get to deal with things in the way we get to deal with them…is a new take, which is crazy in 2012, but it’s kind of a new take on all of that stuff…There’s a moment in one of the episodes where [Roscoe] comes to me and says ‘what do you do when you like a boy and a girl?’ And I’m like ‘I don’t know.’ Marty doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s not sure what to do. I think if he didn’t have his father in his ear saying’ let him do what he wants to do, he’ll figure it out, he needs room to individuate,’ if he wasn’t giving him all that Jungian psychobabble, he’d be like, ‘like the girl.’…he’s just tying to understand and roll with the punches.”

No one show is going to roll back decades of reluctance to give black characters leading roles in movies and television shows. But Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe Kaan are all roles that feel like they’ve been delivered to us from a promising future.

There’s been much controversy about the decision to remake the manga and animated movie Akira with a white cast for American audiences. And the latest is that Kristen Stewart has been offered the role of Ky (Kei in the original). Now, as amused as I am by the prospect of America’s Vampire Sweetheart playing an anti-government terrorist (though what do you bet her stance is watered down?), the offer raises an issue for me. Do actors have any sort of responsibility when they’re offered work that furthers bad trends in the industry?

Now, correct me if I’m wrong in any of what follows. But Kristen Stewart has plenty of work right now. She could probably politely turn this down, saying she needs to, I don’t know, do a lot of publicity for Breaking Dawn, or Snow White and the Huntsman. She could probably even turn the role down less politely and suggest that they hire an Asian actress for the role. Is she absolutely obligated to do that? Probably not. If you’re the lynchpin of a massively profitable franchise, there are a lot of people who are going to want in on your bankability, irrespective of the artistic considerations. But that doesn’t mean that you’re required to take all the offers that you get. And if you want to be considered just on the merits of your performances, you’re not required to use your influence for anything. But if you want to be acclaimed as a person, or as a force for good within the industry, I don’t know if it’s enough to wait until you have your own production company, or until you direct your own movie in your thirties or whenever. At the end of the day, this is is capitalism. You’ve got the right to take those parts and make that money. But if actors, etc. would like to be considered ethical, to be role models, to be using their powers for good, I think it matters as much what they do on the job as what they do with the money they make from it.

Well, the trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman looks visually bonkers in a way that I expect will force Tsarem Singh to up his game with Mirror, Mirror, his competing fairy tale adaptation also due out next year:

Also, it’s nice to see that Chris Hemsworth is getting to use his throwing-dangerous-objects skills from Thor in another movie: way to recycle, Hollywood!

When this trailer came out on Friday, Dodai Stewart over at Jezebel heaved a sigh over both Snow White movies, saying, “But despite looking at the story in a new way, both films feature overwhelmingly white casts. How new and twisty.” I don’t really think either of these adaptations is that new and twisty, though, and ultimately, I think that’s the key to both reinvigorating our fairy tale archetypes and to getting more diverse casting in those fairy tales. Sure, Snow White and the Huntsman has some action-y, monster-y stuff going on, but it’s still the same essential setting, a Christian, European feudal state, and the same basic conflict between two women. Mirror, Mirror, if anything, looks more traditional, with its Snow White in Disneyfied dresses rather than in armor.

You want a non-white or a mixed-race cast, and a genuinely fresh rethinking of the story? Switch regions or continents, and upset the dynamic between some of the main characters considerably. If Snow and the Seven ever gets made, we’ll get a kung-fu twist on the fairy tale, with Chinese warriors from different schools in place of a dwarf-run woodlands B and B. Want to stick to medieval Europe? Why not set the story in Al-Andalus, or during the Reconquista, and throw some genuine religious conflict in a story about a regime that’s trying to solidify itself in the face of an existential threat. Make Snow White a commoner rising up against the monarchy as the head of a peasant’s revolt, or a key player in a fictionalized version of the Haitian revolution. Or make the Evil Queen her mother, not just her stepmother, and use the story to explore mother-daughter rivalry in a much more direct and murderous way. I’m all for color-blind casting. But if we’re satisfied with the same old stories with different people schlepping through the same old parts, that feels like an awfully partial victory to me.

Over at Tiger Beatdown, S.E. Smith thinks that we don’t treat True Blood‘s Tara Thornton like Buffy Summers because she’s black:

Look at Buffy and True Blood’s Tara. The two characters have a lot in common; they’re physically strong, they’re assertive, they’re sassy. They are also both emotionally vulnerable, are sometimes wounded, may scream and cry and pout and stomp. Buffy enjoys a huge following (with a small minority that calls her ‘whiny’) while people pour on the haterade for Tara on a regular basis. She’s too emotional, too screamy, too…much. Buffy’s a strong female character by many people’s lists, but Tara…isn’t. There’s a reason for that.

So really, what people are usually talking about when they talk about the need for ‘strong female characters’ is white cis women, specifically. Emily pointed out in an email when we were discussing this issue that ‘…you have to be assumed weak in the first place for it to be groundbreaking.’ Pop culture routinely positions white women as wilting lilies and delicate flowers, a depiction that dates back centuries, and people understandably want to push back on that.

I’m sensitive to this line of argument, and I think there are other well-made points in the post about making female characters strong by giving them masculine traits. But in the case of Tara, I’m not sure this is correct. What’s frustrating about Tara isn’t that she’s “emotionally vulnerable, are sometimes wounded, may scream and cry and pout and stomp.” It’s that the character never grows, and exhibits consistently poor judgement, sabotaging a potential relationship with a nice, stable man and taking up with a former criminal, seeking protection with and then falling under the spell of a powerful, chaos-inclined magical entity, and then when she gets therapy and rebuilds her life outside of Bon Temps, sabotages it again for no discernable reason, taking up with a genocidal witches’ coven.

I think it’s arguable that Alan Ball’s adaptation of the character is racist. In Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire novels, Tara’s character is a recovering abuse survivor who’s sometimes brittle because of it, but she’s also a small business owner, a good friend to Sookie (though they have their fallings out), a wife and mother—and she’s white. If Ball had kept that character development arc, and committed to that emotional growth, but cast Rutina Wesley in the role, I think we’d think Tara is a hero. Instead, he both made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation. If we’re not cheering Tara it’s because the character has no discernable investment in her own life and happiness. The character’s not strong and unjustly ignored: she’s just static.

I was sort of being flip yesterday when I tweeted that Game of Thrones was engaging in a little reverse racebending by casting a quite dark-skinned black British actor to play a character who George R.R. Martin describes as “pale as milk” in his novels. But I do think that it’s important to see adaptors raise questions about why characters need to be white in the first place.

There are all kinds of characters for whom, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, don’t absolutely need to be white. And really, that’s the way things should work when we’re assigning characters’ races: the default shouldn’t be white. There should be no default. If you’re making a movie about Minnesota Lutherans, or something, then I’m fine if your cast ends up all white. But if you’re making a show about, say, a group of friends who all live in an urban environment, making them all white is as lazy as making every women in pop culture a publicist or an event planner. All sorts of sloth in character design should be embarrassing.

I’m writing a new column for The Loop21*, and the first piece is about remakes that switch characters’ races from white to black, among them Chris Rock’s foreign-film remakes, Will Smith’s adaptations of classic children’s movies as vehicles for his kids, and Clint Eastwood’s A Star is Born. Of these, I tend of find Rock’s remakes the most interesting. It’s not so much that they’re good movies, as the specific way they work on race:

“I Think I Love My Wife” is careful to demonstrate that cheating isn’t the only kind of behavior that transcends race: In one scene, a white teenager shows up in the elevator rapping the same song that a black teenager disrupted the morning quiet with earlier. And a bourgie black dinner foursome and a Japanese executive repeat the same concern about Michael Jackson: “I don’t care about “Thriller”. What kind of grown men has kids sleeping in his bed?”

White elevator passengers and Japanese corporate titans may not have to worry that an overenthusiastic music fan or a troubled pop star reflect badly on them, but we can all shake our heads at the same foolishness.

And while the sibling rivalries in “Death at a Funeral” are as old as Cain and Abel — and as persistent — there’s an additional layer of processing when Rock and Martin’s characters find out that not only is their father gay, but that he was having an affair with a man with dwarfism. They have to reconcile those challenges, and the fact that their father’s gay-dwarf lover was white.

The thing that I think is really interesting about racebending is less that it happens than the casualness with which characters are switched from people of color to white, and the general deliberateness that accompanies a switch in the opposite direction. Hollywood, it seems, never needs a justification as to why a character should be white.

*If anyone out there’s interested in race, politics, and culture, and is looking to break in to writing about things, The Loop21′s hiring writing fellows right now. It’s a great new set of editors over there, so definitely worth checking out.

-Louis C.K. on his time with his kids and taking a later slot to avoid catering to advertisers.

-Racebending: the beat goes on.

-I’m continually amazed by the extent to which people want the state to do their parenting work for them.

-The perpetual crisis in rock.

-This is great, but I wish folks would remember that there are Chumbawamba songs other than “Tubthumping”: