Just to be clear, snowy owls are the minority, since most owls are brown. I am not making Neurotic Owl a horrible racist, just a guilty liberal.
This is a rerun, of course, because I realized a thing and I am ashamed and the other cartoons I have queued don’t really serve to EXPOSE MY SHAME. So I’ve mentioned how uncomfortable I am with the kind of color-blind casting regularly practiced in opera, wherein it’s perfectly acceptable to cast a white dude as Otello and PAINT HIM BROWN (shudders in horror). The thing is, I completely overlooked the fact that we’re also doing Madame Butterfly with a Hispanic lead, because I guess I don’t care about Asian representation because I guess I’m a racist? I think it has more to do with the fact that I’ve seen ballets and operas of Butterfly many times since childhood, and they’ve rarely, if ever, used an Asian lead (much less Japanese specifically), and so it somehow felt less obvious than white Othello, but I suck. I should have caught that. I think it probably does say something about our culture that Asian representation is easier to overlook, and that sucks quite a lot.
Funnily enough, I’ve just been looking at the photos of costumes for Cosi Fan Tutte, and that may be the surprise contender for most racist show of the season. Yay?
Neurotic Owl 
We just did South Pacific with a dark-skinned Emile, and I wouldn’t have realized anything was amiss of the director hadn’t decided to paint him paler. It was bad enough we only had one actual Asian girl for the group of Pacific-islanders.
Aaagh! See, I think I could live with the color blind casting because it really is completely color blind – one of the other principals in Otello is black, for example – if they would just quit PAINTING PEOPLE COLOURS THEY AREN’t.