re: Hollywood replacing white people in true stories with black actors

I try to stay the hell out of these types of discussions lately but one example from a few years ago has stuck out to me as especially egregious to the point that I want to add it.

There was a West End (English Broadway basically) production of Apollo 13 called "Dark Side of the Moon" a few years ago that cast Fred Haise as a black guy.

This is Fred Haise, who is not only white but still very much alive:



This is the guy who played him:



The play is an exercise in speculation; it imagines what the astronauts might've discussed while out of communication with Earth. Among those topics? Structural racism and civil rights. As if these astronauts had any time or wherewithal to discuss anything beyond that which would improve their chances of survival.

They couldn't even wait until Fred Haise was dead to erase him from one of the most heroic episodes of American history. And they couldn't be bothered to tell the story of true American badasses like Ronald McNair. Just lazy shoehorn social justice rewritten history nonsense.