“Purist comic-book fans are one thing; out-and-out racism is another,” the 38-year-old actor told journalist Leslie Gornstein in a Q&A published Sunday. “Of course, the more I speak on this topic, the more I fuel it. But, look, if people have a problem with me playing the character, just don’t go see the movie, you know?”

There’s a website calling for a boycott  of Marvel for inserting “left-wing social engineering into European mythology” with the casting of Elba and the dust-up has been covered in the British press dating back to last year.

Early on Elba took the stance that in a film as fantastical as “Thor” it seems a bit odd to fixate on one authenticity topic. The Guardian picked up this quote in April 2010:  ”There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character? Hang about, Thor’s mythical, right? Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. That’s OK, but the color of my skin is wrong? I was cast in ‘Thor’ and I’m cast as a Nordic god. If you know anything about the Nords, they don’t look like me but there you go. I think that’s a sign of the times for the future. I think we will see multi-level casting. I think we will see that, and I think that’s good.”

If you think about it, the Norse gods (at least in the Marvel Universe) could have appeared to be any race or ethnicity. As super-powered hyper-dimensional space beings, when they appeared to the Norse people, they would have been perceived as all mighty, mystical deities, and like many other civilizations, the Norse people would have portrayed them in their own image. As long as they’re vaguely humanoid, the Norsemen would have recognized their resemblance no matter what color they were, but over time they would have begun to portray them with Norse skin colors and hair types, bringing them closer to Norse beauty standards. But that’s just a theory.

(Source: sevenpoints, via smallrevolutionary)