So, does skin color matter or not?

 Well, there has been a constant uproar about gender and raceswaps in popular franchises -understandably so.

The response to this is always "diversity" and "representation" as if it was not the laziest, stupidest way to represent "people of color" -an easy way to pander and cause controversy which is supposed to drive interest in your product. (Aka "fan baiting").

The response is usually also: well, it is a fictional character, so what are you so upset about. (So we do not do it to historical ones? Sure about that?) Or: this was the perfect person for the role. Or: we need more representation.

(It is a long topic to discuss, but a short version - fans tend to like the stuff they like the way it is. They do not want their expectations subverted, and so on and so forth.)

The easiest response to this is obviously then, well, what about a white Black Panther? Or a white Spawn? So far I got not response to this. Usually the comeback is an accusation of racism. (For the record: I dislike the raceswaps in Ghost in a Shell, and other movies, where the characters were switched to white, but apparently that does not count.) Regardless the fall-back argument is that you should not be arguing about the skin color of a made-up character. So any non-historical character is free game to change -and only a racist would complain. OK, gotcha. (Talking about racism... there is plenty of that going around, but somehow it is normalized. Imagine a white guy saying he is not watching something because the main character is female or non-white... but I digress.)

Back to our topic: we can mention historical characters, too, who underwent raceswaps: Queen Charlotte, Anne Boylen, kinda Vikings, and now Queen Cleopatra. (And while we are at falsifying history, let's talk about the Woman King...)

So can we change those, too, or not? Can now we have finally Daniel Craig play Malcom X? 

Apparently the rule now is that any character can be switched to any race or gender, right?

Gotcha.

Enter Milo and Stitch. Read the linked article (and about the whole idiotic uproar). A bona fide Hawaiian actress is not brown enough for these people. I repeat: she is actually native to Hawaii. Her only sin is that she is too white. And NOW it is unacceptable to do a "raceswap". Which, I repeat, is NOT a raceswap. 

The mind boggles. I guess now we can come with the whole "relax, it is a fictional character, she could be a male and played by Dolph Lundgren, you are racist for making it an issue and so on and so forth".

The sheer idiocy and lack of self-awareness of these people is astonishing. 

Racism and identity politics

This video is an interesting take on the whole diversity issue.
Essentially Peterson argues that even though there are measurable, objective differences between different groups, the differences are realtively small. They are not significant next to the differences between individuals.
Therefore any argument for diversity based race or gender is basically a racist one, because it essentially states that the major differences between a white person and, let's say, and Asian person are determined by their race, and not by their persons. So an Asian person is more alike to all other Asians, a black person to all other blacks, and a man is to all the men in the world. This reduces a person essentially to his or her "group" being race, gender, sexual orientation, age or anything else.
This is obviously racist, and I do agree with his conclusion on this particular point -somewhat. Indeed the whole problem and paradox of identity politics is that it is fundamentally racist.

But then he further argues that the real basis of diversity is the individual. I am not certain I can accept this, however.

Those small differences he mentioned added up do amount to visible/detectable differences between individuals. Peterson makes the mistake of taking these differences on their own, and not looking at their cummulative effect. Taken as a whole, these differences do amount to an overall variation between groups, even though certain members of the groups may indeed be more similar to another person from a different group than to members of their own group.

So no. I do think it is still important to have as many types of people in groups as possible, although it is probably true that it does not necessarily mean that you have to focus on the "emphasised" grouping, like gender or race. While it may seem like a no-brainer that including a black guy in a group of lawyers may add an extra point of view, I would argue that if that token black guy is coming from the same Harvard environment as the rest of his pastry white co-workers, he will not  bring as much diversity of point of view into this group as a white kid for Idaho who attended to community college (or, god forbid, someone from an European country) would. If you include a black guy who is coming from a ghetto, you are getting there, however. But this is the point that Jordan is pressing: just by picking a random feature, and making it into the sole basis of "diversity", you are essentially a racist (if this feature is race), or, indeed sexist (if it is gender).