In Smallville alone, biracial Chinese-American Kristen Kreuk was cast to play a racebent version of Clark Kent’s teenaged sweetheart Lana Lang. (And Dean Cain’s Clark Kent on The Adventures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the early Nineties was visibly not white.)
However, the fandom’s response to this newly Black Pete Ross was… different.
When folks in fandom deigned to write him, they wrote him as a shucking and jiving stereotype, an approximation of what they think Black men were like In 2002.
Back then, longtime fan writer teland aired one hell of a grievance about the way that folks in the Smallville fandom insisted on writing Pete Ross when the series first aired, writing that:
If I *never* see another story where Pete fucking ROSS goes around speaking stereotypical JIVE again it will be too soon. What the fuck is *wrong* with you people? Do you *watch* the show? Has Pete *ever* been anything but a normal smartass teenaged boy with a crush on Chloe and a lust for every other woman his eyes have lit upon? Has he *ever* expressed an interest in the poetry of Amiri Baraka? Does he cruise the streets of Smallville in his low-rider and do drive-bys with his do-rag arranged in Criply perfection?
No?
Then why the *fuck* do you write him that way, numbnuts?