Personally, I've always thought that changing a long established character's race is stupid. It is also dumb when they change someone's race in an era where it wouldn't make sense and/or would cause problems. (i.e. Will Smith as James West in WILD WILD WEST. A black government agent right after the Civil War wouldn't have been able to operate without big problems in the South. And I hated that they made Loveless into a racist.)

Samuel L. Jackson is fine as Nick Fury, because it's the ULTIMATES universe version. But if they had made him the regular Marvel Universe version, then Fury wouldn't have been the Howling Commandos' leader in WW2.

I was just in Russia!

Even though 3/4ths of the landmass of Russia lies in Asia, more than 3/4ths of the population lie in the Eastern European portion and they are descended from the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. What most people think of as "Russia" is European.

Of course not. But they are linked together in a way that other traits are not.

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Korea has a history, and a culture, and an identity.  It isn't the same as the history, culture, and identity, of people in Japan.  People from Korea and Japan are not just interchangeably 'Asian', though they are treated that way by Hollywood.  The label 'Asian' was created by people not from Asia as a label, to lump together a whole mass of disparate groups of people.

The same is true of these other mass labels.  "White" is especially problematic.  As I already pointed out, for a goodly portion of U.S. history, the Irish, Italians, any other Roman Catholic groups, etc. were not 'white'.  Other groups used to be 'white', but now are labelled differently.  Danny Thomas, in the 50's, was 'white'.  Now he would be considered an 'Arab-American' even though Lebanese folk, especially Lebanese Christians like Danny Thomas, don't consider themselves Arabs.  Likewise, Desi Arnaz was 'white', now he would be Latino.  But Latinx is a label that again, unites people from a huge geographical area which contains a multitude of cultures, skin colors, histories, and identities.

These are labels invented to create in-groups and out-groups.  And frankly, I'm hoping that DNA testing will soon destroy this whole concept, as people realize that their own personal family histories are a lot more complicated than they probably think.  So yeah, I dismiss 'race' as a way to identify, because people should identify with their own histories, and the histories of their family.  In the past, that wasn't always accessible to people.  Now, through science, it is.  I reject 'race' as a way to identify because I don't think 'race' exists.