There’s loud, recurring outrage whenever a fictional character is recast from white to Black. The mirror move, taking a real person of color who did something remarkable and casting them as a white man, draws almost none, mostly because audiences never find out it happened.
Three true stories make it concrete. In Argo, the CIA officer who engineered the hostage rescue was Tony Mendez, who was Latino; he’s played by Ben Affleck, and the film soft-pedals his surname. World Trade Center took a real first responder who was Black and rendered the role white. 21 took the mostly Asian American MIT card-counting team and recast the leads as white.
The point isn’t that any one casting choice is a scandal. It’s the directionality. Swapping a minor fictional character toward a minority reads as an ideological affront; swapping a real, accomplished minority toward whiteness reads as unremarkable, because the accomplished white hero is already the audience’s expected shape. Reality gets quietly edited to match the stored template, and the edits that reinforce the template are the ones nobody registers. What passes for “accuracy” is often just congruence with expectation, and selective outrage is decent evidence of what a culture treats as its unmarked norm.