The argument boils down to this: White voice actors are overrepresented in the **AMERICAN** voice acting field, and have historically been given roles regardless of the character's race/culture; while nonwhite voice actors are often only given roles associated with their race, if roles at all. So when casting someone of a particular underrepresented background, you should look for voice actors from that same general background. Also I have some thoughts on the broader argument because, while I mostly agree with Sungwon, I still kind of disagree with him but I don't have to misrepresent him to do that.

For a very long time, minorities had a lot more trouble getting into both the acting and voice acting industry, and white people were frequently cast in roles that were deliberately written to be from a certain race/culture.

Hollywood and live action acting definitely caught up as things like blackface were shunned by broader society; but voice acting remained a very predominantly white field. You would see very few nonwhite people who could make it in the American voice acting industry, and many of those who could were already live action actors who had made connections in the industry.

This all kind of came to a head in the 2016-2020 era Black Lives Matter movement (because it's never what the protestors actually want, its always small symbolic victories instead), where there was a broader push for nonwhite voice actors to have the roles of characters from their race/culture. The argument being that white voice actors have more chances for roles as well as are more likely to be cast in the first place.

Now I don't know if I entirely agree with the argument; as while this has been going on there's been a broader push for diversity in storytelling; and that includes having more characters that need voice actors that have diverse backgrounds. Woke agenda or whatever. The point is that there is a lot more diversity in your average show/movie, which means that there's a lot more chances for people of color to get the roles they want, which means that I don't know if I agree with this argument. My take is that its fine for any person of any race to play any character, as long as there isn't an industry-wide trend that predominantly hurts nonwhite VAs. If there's a larger degree of acceptance and a larger amount of roles that nonwhite VAs are cast in, it just remains to be seen if the course has been corrected or if we got a few more breakout nonwhite voice actors and called it a day.