I gotta be 100% honest with you, because this kind of thing needs to be said.
I've never been a fan of changing a character's race/gender/sexuality/religion ecc. for a long time.
With all the shit happening because of these "extreme changes" that are being made to pop colture characters (Buttercup from The Powerpuff Girls being a black lesbian in the 2021 live action plot [which is a total mistake, this is the less worst thing of it], Ariel the mermaid also being black, Velma from Scooby Doo being turned into a black lesbian as well ecc.), I decided to analyze the thing.
Many companies think that doing such drasting changes to a character everybody loves can somehow stop someone from being racist/homophobic ecc. Does it work? It probably did, on someone. But someone else could have just started to hate the character. Some other that doesn't discriminate doesn't see the character as they used to and could stop liking it. So, is it a good idea to do this if you're a big company? No, but it depends. Let me explain:
If someone (an artist on the internet or a company) does this black-washing thing NOT to spread awareness but just because of an innocent redesign of the character they genuenly thought fitted, is that ok? For me, absolutely. I've seen tons of artists drawing a character with darker/lighter skin without spending all of their time reposting and sharing BLM stuff OBSESSIVELY, or people who change a character's sexuality but don't have a pride flag pfp. I did that myself, but was I trying to spread awareness or something? No. It was just for fun. Was I trying to communicate that a "white straight man" is a bad thing? Absolutely not. I'm white myself, & I know a lot of white straight men myself who are the nicest people ever. So why would I hate all of them?
If you actually think about it, none of this actually hurts anybody or is objectively wrong (except if you're FORCING a drastic redesign of a character to "keep up with today's problems" and spread awareness, because, y'know, that's definitely not how you convince someone to stop being a moron, you're just gonna be trending on Twitter, and not because people love your work).
Thanks for coming to my talk show I guess
Also another thing:
I remember seeing a comment from an account that reposted a lot of fanarts - without permission - under a post with a black-washed character that was like "Why is she black?", and the artist's reply was "So you don't repost" 💀💀💀