I am of two minds about this.
One,it is always good to see more diversity and to see it done well. Most of the time,utter fail happens as seen with The Help,The Secret Life Of Bees and The Hunger Games and countless others.
Keep in mind that I haven't read/seen The Secret Life of Bees, and my knowledge about The Help and Hunger Games is only from the movies. The Help was flawed but it wasn't an utter failure. It succeeded in the one piece of advice I always hear: know your audience. In the US, the general audience is squeamish about realistic suffering and over the top violence like Tarantino goes down easier.
I think The Help could have escaped the controversy and still appealed to a wide audience if it had halved its characters(including Skeeter), and spent more time developing Abilieen, Minny, and Celia.
Two,there MUST be writers of color in the mix and we must be given our seats at the table. It is nice that non POC writers want to bring diversity to the table. The danger comes when it becomes acceptable for ONLY them to do so and writers of color are drowned out or our POV viewed as not needed. Our voices are just as important and needed.
The reason why publishing gives so few writers of color the chance to write about our respective cultures and POC characters is due to racist assumptions that:
a)We don't read aka the book will be a financial loss. Or we only read in very narrow categories. This is especially true for Black readers concerning erotica and urban fiction. It translates into all we want is sex and violence.
Yes, I do wish there were was more encouragement for PoC writers to branch out into different genres, and I hate that there are writers I know who are given advice to use pseudonyms if their name sounds ethnic.
b)Non POC readers won't give the book a chance because they can't relate or are uncomfortable with the subject matter. We,as writers of color tend to be blunt about issues our characters might encounter and don't sugar coat shit. That's why the The Help can become a hit movie but Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl will NEVER hit the big screen. Part of the reason for The Help backlash is because the story has been told a thousand times and done better by Black writers without the fairytale sheen and white savior trope. Bernice McFadden wrote a very good article about this.
I wouldn't hold my breath on that either. The first difference between the two movies is that The Help is fiction and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl isn't. Sugar-coated fiction whose darker elements was not letting a maid poop pales in comparison to a biography about real fear and dehumanization. The other difference is that there would be harsher backlash if someone screwed up Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The only movie production company I could trust to pull it off might be HBO.
I bring up HBO because this isn't a problem restricted to skin color. Movies depicting war and genocide that make it to the big screen water down the atrocities. I couldn't stand the first fifteen minutes of Hotel Rwanda, but I was sucked into Sometimes in April after five. There are always going to be better and and more accurate books/movies that get less press.
In short,diversity in fiction is needed. But writers of color are especially needed. There is most definitely an issue as to who is writing the characters. My teen-age cousins and all of their friends have zero interest in the latest YA crazes. I mean,none. They were especially pissed at the depiction of Rue and blacks in The Hunger Games. So they don't read the books or see the movies because of how the author wrote the characters and yes,the race of the author comes into play just as it does in what I previously mentioned. They flat out told me the White lady doesn't know what she's talking about and if she writes Black characters like that,it is a reflection of how she feels about Black people in real life.
I didn't see any problems with Rue, and if her character was exactly the same in the book, then it sounds like nitpicking. She wasn't a stereotype, and I prefer it if authors don't think that all black people sound/act the same. The other characters weren't developed enough for me to feel anything about them.
This probably isn't true,but words have power. How a non POC person writes characters of color will be judged and dissected thoroughly. This is why many writers who mean well and want to try stay completely away from diversity.
Sam,LJHall is completely right. If we cannot tell our own stories and see success,but someone else who has never lived the culture or truly understands it,can,it becomes a problem and that needs to change.
I don't know how to change it. I know one place to start is with publishing companies. From little things to big things, they influence future writers and one of their continuous mistakes is whitewashing covers. It doesn't send out a positive message to writers or readers.