The fundamental point of egalitarian philosophy is that your gender, race, class, sexuality et cetera don't matter. Whenever such things can be ignored they should be ignored.
The author of the article sites his reasoning is to avoid the "White Savoir" trope, but the ideal conclusion to civil rights is not avoiding that trope, it's having the luxury of not taking note of it. I don't want to live in a world where you can't have a savior character who happens to be white without them being a part of the "White Savior" trope.
Remember, the thing that makes racism so unreasonable is that it's all in our heads. Race is not an objective phenomenon that holds sway over us without our collective permission - we permit it's presence; WE give it credibility; WE give it power. The author has made the mistake of treating the trope in question like it's something that is inherent in the work itself, as opposed to something that the audience projects.
Iron Fist, as far as I can tell from my research, is not a story with a racial message. There is nothing within the text itself that suggests the ethnicity of Danial Rand is important. Any perceived racial undertones are the result of the ephemeral zeitgeist of the audience.
Trying to deliberately inject a non-racially minded story with these ideas is a slippery slope. You could make the same argument for Thor, Captain America or Superman if you squint. You could argue that Black Panther is a racist caricature if you wanted to.
If we're now morally obligated to consider every interaction between one race and another in the context of racism if at all possible, then we will be obligated to do so until the end of time. That's the nature of racism; it's all bullshit, all made up. We created it, and we continue to build and create it every with every generation within which we instill it's principals.
If we follow this line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion, the irony is that there will be nothing more important to us about a character than all the factors we claim shouldn't matter. We'll become so paranoid about whether or not the thing we're inspecting is racist that it will be impossible to write a story that ISN'T racially motivated.
At some point, somewhere down the line, if we want to be free of this oppression we're going to have to stop constantly looking over our shoulder; we're going to have to deaden the nerves that our collective fear and guilt over race have rendered so sensitive; we're going to have to accept that, to an untainted eye, a cigar is just a cigar and skin is just skin. And someday, perhaps the color of your skin will truly not matter.
Iron Fist's race doesn't have to be important, and I don't think we should make it important.
