The Four Color Media Monitor

Actress Rodriguez recently argued against changing a character's race just to appeal to minorities, although her initial argument wasn't placed with the right side. She first told TMZ:

TMZ: Michele, are you gonna be the Green Lantern?

Michelle Rodriguez: Haha, That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard

TMZ: Really?

Rodriguez: Yeah, because of this whole minorities in Hollywood thing.

TMZ: It's been all over the Internet though.

Rodriguez: But it's so stupid. Stop stealing all the white people's superheroes, you know? Make up your own. I mean, what's up with that?

Newsarama says she later apologized after some people got mad at her for misplacing her complaint:

Rodriguez later apologized and clarified saying she would like to see Hollywood create new minority roles rather than retrofit white characters to non-white actors. The context she was unaware of either when originally asked the question or when she issued her clarification (at no fault of her own, mind you) was the original article (our’s) was about a new minority character DC had created and if used on the big screen wouldn’t just be replacing a white male character with a female minority.

Now she's correct in the sense that Hollywood - and more importantly, the comics medium - should be creating more roles for protagonists of different racial backgrounds and not going out of their way to forcibly replace established white superheroes with people of different race/gender. But it's not people of different race who're "stealing". It's the publishers themselves who're going overboard pandering to minorities sans good storytelling, and I'm glad she cleared things up and noted that Hollywood is the one who's really supplanting whites in terms of movies. But she should take a good look at comicdom if she wants to see some real awful pandering in motion. And she should really tell Dan DiDio and Axel Alonso to quit all these steps because it's not fooling anybody.

Labels: dc comics, Green Lantern, marvel comics, politics