Owyn_Merrilin said:
You still didn't answer my question. If the decision was made because the creators were racist, why give their works the time of day? Why not make a new, not rooted in racism property?
It's the same reason almost nobody is making new property these days: rebooting or adapting a known and still popular name is less risky than trying to establish a new one.
It's like Aunt Jemima's maple syrup. Aunt Jemima's first came about under that name because it came out at a time when black women were overwhelmingly associated with subservient roles, such as cooking and house cleaning. So the idea was pretend the syrup was made by a woman named "Aunt Jemima"--a woman whose biggest role is to make
you, the white consumer, delicious maple syrup.
Now the brand still exists, but unless you read up on its history you don't know anything about that. They just took the focus away from that and now with time the trope has faded from most people's common knowledge. Personally, I still find it a bit off-putting now that I know about it, but I never bought the syrup anyway (I'm a Hungry Jack gal, myself) and as long as nobody else is greatly offended I don't care one way or another what goes on with it.
So back to comics. While the characters were created during a racist time and that's why they're white, the characters themselves are not racist. Like the syrup--only the connotation behind the name was racist, not the product itself. So a bit of rebranding can easily fix that. And in a way, mixing up a few races
is akin to making a new property. You're simply giving certain aspects of it a slightly different aesthetic identity. Rebranding and changing up canon is something that is rampant in comics, adaptations, and reboots. I don't really get why most comic book fans won't bat an eye at Batman's transition from your standard goody-two-shoes hero to the "Dark Knight," a psychologically troubled man who finds solace in killing people in the dark. But as soon as you make him
black, that's simply going too far.