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Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.
Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.
We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.
I just read an article where the UC system dropped 75% of faculty applicants for insufficient DEI commitment. Apparently it was a huge demerit to agree with the idea, "I try to treat everyone the same." It's not just kids today, it's being burned into institutions intentionally.
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I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.
To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.
I mean, sure, that's their take on it and the frame that they insist on using, but that's not generally the intent. The intent is "Orwellian editing is morally wrong and we will fight you if you do it". There's much, much less of this pushback against new properties that "represent" than there is against retconning established ones.
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I'd argue that given the symbolism of the rainbow flag, "colorblind" works fine.
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They don't want a truce, and they don't see the necessity of one since they think (and not without reason) that they can sweep the board utterly. Before you can even think about truce, you have to win a bunch of battles.
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