Race
So - one of the projects I am working on now has 10 people in it - all people who were involved before I was hired. Almost everyone is playing multiple roles. It's a story being told by people in the "future", about the past (early 30's Eastern Europe.)

There is one black guy in the cast. He has 3 roles. One of them is a political protester, who becomes a suicide bomber and kills (accidentally) the heroine's one true love. The second is a child molester, struggling to deal with his "unnatural urges" (that one is small - just a page or so.) The last is an "Adam" character, who eventually, from a place of total innocence, becomes the father of the next human race ("Eve" is white.)

The cast is set, but I do have both the power and authority to shift around some of the smaller roles. I talked to him about shifting him from the child molester monologue to a monologue (a little shorter, and less complex) by a guy who owns a mine. He was heartbroken.

I told him I thought it was shady the way the only black guy in the cast was playing the two overt criminals (suicide bomber and child molester.) He pointed out that there is certainly a lot of morally questionable and even possibly genocidal behavior on the part of a bunch of the white characters, which is true - although all of those characters are presented in some way as tragic heroes.

I said I thought it was important that when people watch this thing (or anything,ever, actually), they don't get one more piece of the black-men-are-criminals narrative put in their face. He argued passionately and articulately about the work he had done building those two characters, and about his performance of them as a work of art that he had created.

I told about how I've spent the last decade of my life actively working to usurp the presumptive narrative's positioning of p.o.c.s in every single story-telling event and work of art that I have created.

I made a decision about what to do, but I wonder what you guys think.