Look, if you can point me to a moment in the overall plot, or any of the character arcs that actually depended on anyone's fictional ethnicity or whether there is something like a vague earth-human counterpart to it and what it was, then I could see the point. And there are stories you can't tell in full without respecting matters of race. I don't remember an instant that made Avatar one of those stories. You can make a live action adaptation of the Lion King without casting a single lion. You can make a live action adaptation of Robots without casting a single robot. You can't make a live action adaptation of Ice Age without characters that would have the sort of conflict you'd see between mammoths and humans, or predator cats and their natural prey, that is as naturally explained as by the animal species selected for the original tale. Or, you can tell Ice Age without it, but you'd have to somehow establish those conflicts in far more explicit terms, if race/species is no option. You can't retell Shrek without portraying the titular character as something regular people would find repulsive or frightening or both, by his appearance and stereotypes about his kind, and if his kind is the same as everyone else's, you'd have to write that aspect out altogether, or bend over backwards to explain it.
If the vaguely Inuit-like people of the water tribes were cast with African American actors, what else about the script would need to change? If the vaguely Asian people of much of the rest of the world of Avatar were instead cast with, say, Latin/South Americans of matching variation, just how much would that warp the story, really? And if the best casting match happened to be white, that, too, wouldn't cost the story much, I find. A priority should be on a cast that would do well with the characters, not the colours they were coated with in the cartoon. Just what race is a "wrong" race to play King Bumi? What's the "correct" race to portray Iroh? He is said to be closely related to Zuko and Azula, remember.
Now, I don't know if that line in the announcement is just a throwaway line to satisfy the sort of target demographic they expect to have, or if it is in reference to the outrage at the admittedly odd casting choices of the 2010 feature film, or if they are genuinely concerned about such superficial, trivial fluff, and I'm by no means judging the show based on that in advance. But I find that in this case it is profoundly unimportant, and, if anything, a fixation on it over substantive things like the themes, plots, and characters, can only get in the way, and with no benefit to compensate for it.
Better to leave questions unanswered than answers unquestioned
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