Originally Posted by
Jim Kelly
Before there was Black Canary, there was Harvey's Black Cat. And probably Bob Kanigher and Carmine Infantino were hoping for some of the popularity of that character to rub off on their character (the cat and the canary, get it).
A lot of characters were named Black something and were Caucasian. It wasn't white washing, because most characters were predominantly white. And look what happened when E.C. published a story with a black hero--they got shut down by the Comics Code.
I find the trend toward retconning every character with a "Black" codename into a person of colour to be mildly offensive. The colour codenames should really come from the colour of their costume or their symbol, I think. So a green arrow, a green lantern, a red bee, a blue beetle, a black hawk, a black condor, a black canary, a red tornado, a yellow wasp, a green hornet, a black bat, a scarlet pimpernel.