I've been frequenting StackExchange sites for quite some time; if you're not familiar, they're basically Yahoo Answers done right. Reading through the Anime and Manga forum, I came across a post about racism in One Piece. This also led me to read this blog post and this rather long post on IGN (WARNING: links contain One Piece spoilers. The rest of this post contains very minor spoilers.)

All of them pointed out that many One Piece characters became markedly lighter in skin tone after the time skip in the series. There are some very telling pictures of this happening to Usopp and Zoro. But even more than that, there is a character who is able to change genders, and for some reason Inazuma is much lighter as a woman than a man. The same can be seen with a random guy who also switched genders. In all of these cases I really don't understand what the animators were thinking; there's no apparent reason for it, and it seems blatantly racist. On the other hand, I don't agree with calling Oda (the author) racist, since the same differences don't appear in the manga cover art. (Skin tone obviously isn't a thing in the normal black and white chapters.) But I digress.

Obviously racism is usually bad thing; discriminating solely based on skin color or ethnicity makes zero sense in most settings. (And yes, I did say "most" and not "all". Sometimes you do have to treat different ethnicities differently; for example, South Asian men are 50% more likely to develop heart disease than the general population. A doctor not taking that into account during a diagnosis would at the very least be viewed as negligent.) What I don't agree with is forcing ethnicity into media for the sake of "diversity" and making sure no one feels "left out". That line of thinking has a fundamental flaw. To showcase this, I'm going to make some assumptions I think someone arguing for equal representation in media would hold, then use a scenario to demonstrate the hipocrisy inherent in the set of assumptions.

Assumptions

  1. All ethnicities have the same rights. Believing otherwise is racism.
  2. It is infeasible to represent every single ethnicity in a work.
  3. A work is labeled as "racist" by an ethnic group if they are not represented.

Scenario

Therefore it is wholly illogical to deride a work for "racism" due to exclusion of ethnicities. Even if every single character in a work is white, you cannot call it racist without yourself being racist. As soon as you are content with the set of ethnicities represented in the work, you are effectively being racist by picking and elevating favroites. So we have to change at least one of the assumptions. Overall, #1 is agreed on by much of society (although we would do better with something like "Every person has certain rights") and #2 is simply fact. Thus, to resolve the contradiction, we should get rid of #3.

Again, I am not defending the practice of whitewashing characters as happened in One Piece, or more famously in The Last Airbender. Neither of those make sense to me, and I would call them, at the very least, racially insensitive. I am also not defending other racist behaviors such as insulting stereotypes or blatant discrimination. I am attacking what seems to me an extension of Reverse Discrimination. Obviously if an employer refuses to hire an employee solely based on skin color then he is in the wrong. But just because an employer has no (insert ethnicity here) on his staff does not mean he is racist. Let me repeat that a little "louder" since it's the main message of this post:

Just because an employer has no (insert ethnicity here) on his staff does not mean he is racist.

The above assertion is an example of the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" (if you aren't familiar, please do follow that link). I think we should be striving for true Racial Blindness, which not only excludes the discrimination of minorities, but also Reverse Discrimination, Racial Integration, and Racial quotas. While I expect it will be a long time coming, I look forward to the day when it does.