Changing the race may not seem like a big deal to you, but it really does matter.

Maybe in a social sense, meaning the audience’s reactions to the story, yes. Does it make a difference to the story itself? I can’t see how it does without adopting essentialist notions of race (ie, “racism”).

Which of course is the entire point of criticizing Le Guin on the matter.

%name said:

I recommend reading Pam Nole’s essay “Shame” about this:
http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/noles.html then maybe looking up some of Tim Wise’s commentaries on race.

I read the link you provided, but I am not going to bother seeking out other material as though I need to be [re]educated. I didn’t find the essay to provide any compelling rationale to suspend the freedom of artists to choose the race of their characters as they wish. Plenty can be said about movies that bastardize the stories they’re based off of, but in this particular case I don’t see anything to get upset about. Le Guin’s analogy of the bastardization that took place with Earthsea is to having Frodo become a new Sauron … Which is not only racist, but it’s just plain absurd.

I recommend reading Pam Nole’s essay “Shame” about this:
http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/noles.html then maybe looking up some of Tim Wise’s commentaries on race.

Here’s the catch though — LeGuin doesn’t make a case for why changing the main character from her “red-brown” color to white, or any of the other characters for that matter, is significant except insofar as it doesn’t coincide exactly with the book as-written. To my knowledge the Earthsea books are not an alternate-history Earth. What exactly is the “contextual implication and backstory” that their skin color then provides? You assert it is so, but provide nothing to demonstrate your claim.
The only justification LeGuin seems to provide is that she didn’t want to write a book about “honkeys” — Hardly a legitimate justification in my eyes. I read three different versions of her thoughts about this matter and while the Slate version is more truncated and focused on the race issue than longer versions, she simply doesn’t make an argument for why the change in any way alters the story.

You bring up the Matrix, but I’d like to bring up a good Sci-Fi series — Dune. Conveniently this is another series of books that the Sci-Fi channel has adapted for television (twice).

What LeGuin is objecting to seems to me to be like objecting if the Sci-Fi channel had made the spice melange cause spice-addicts’ eyes to glow green rather than blue. A cause for concern and perhaps a canary in the mine as far as the quality of the series, but ultimately trivial.

On the other hand, the ethnicity of the Fremen is something that I find to be seriously intertwined with understandings and interpretations of Dune. With regards to that the Sci-Fi channel did preserve an ethnic appearance for the Fremen (though I would have preferred an even more pronounced one, but I suppose a few thousand years might change the look of a people).

LeGuin *is* most concerned with the racial aspects, because when she was dreaming up the story, this thought came to her:

“Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”

The fact that her characters weren’t white provided an enormous amount of contextual implication and backstory. It’s a central pillar in the architecture of her story.

This same argument came up in The Matrix - another story where there was a very conscious decision to bring more color into the cast. If you thought about it (and watched the Animatrix) you’d see that white cultures were the ones who used the machines the most, so they were the first to go when the machines rebelled. Plus we’ve got missiles pointed everywhichway and we’re using up resources at an unsustainable rate. All signs point to a future with fewer white people.

Any good science-fiction writer is going to try to mix logically consistent science with their fiction. A future in which whites are a smaller part of the genepool is almost assured… so LeGuin chose that as an element of the ’science’ part of her fiction. It wasn’t just tacked on later, so it can’t just be lopped off without destroying one of the core concepts of the story.

Her arguments are neither superficial, disgusting, or anachronistic. Those epithets do apply, however, to the producers of the film, who didn’t have the balls to present the story as it had originally been told. And apparently they also apply to you.

If I were you, I’d ask myself why you got so upset when you read that article. You might learn something.