There are anime/manga that you can adapt and cast with white people. For instance: Fullmetal Alchemist, Attack on Titan, Black Butler, Cowboy Bebop, and Helsing all take place outside of Japan and have predominantly white characters. Adapt them.

Death Note is different. デスノート (Desu Nōto) is what it’s originally called - it means Death Notebook. Keeping the name in Japanese while presenting it with a fully American cast in America is just stupid. Why is he called Kira if the name Kira was coined from the Japanese pronunciation of “killer”? What the heck is a Japanese death god doing in Seattle? The list goes on.

“It’s an American reimagination!”
American =/= white. Asians are the most underrepresented group of people in US television. Light’s role especially would have given an opportunity to break popular stereotypes: he’s presented as an incredibly intelligent and ruthless young man heading for success, who hides his god-complex underneath a charismatic, sexy, and popular mask. This contrasts directly with how East Asians tend to be portrayed.

    “Netflix is allowed creative license!”
    For those of you unfamiliar with it, Death Note is about the conflict of this kid being in a morally grey area where he’s eliminating criminals using a magic death-god powered notebook but is “wrong” because he’s doing it outside of the law - and it’s up to a genius detective known as L to stop him. In the remake, as I’ve mentioned before, Light is a white boy and L is black.
    This ‘adaption’ falls so flat because Japan shapes Light’s sense of justice. It specifically comes down to Japan’s justice system: in which most cases don’t make it to a prosecutor/court, whereas in America, money makes a huge difference in your defense.
Basically, Light’s sense of justice is based heavily on the fact that many criminals never got a conviction and he deemed them guilty based on the facts that were available to him, whereas an American Light’s solution to injustice will be very different to original Light’s initial screening-his-victims approach.
 (That was long so I’ll paraphrase: Light’s sense of justice involves acting as the prosecution, thus an American Light should just be going against rich people (if he were to draw conclusions himself) or other people portrayed badly in the media… like black people.)

Japan is very racially and culturally homogeneous country. The crime narrative does not necessarily rely on race, whereas in America it kind of does. So basically you’ve got, again, a white guy killing people who aren’t white. Death Note is a story that’s almost contingent on Japan’s justice system; Light’s father and his squad (and L) are specifically and inherently Japanese in their handling of crime. It could never translate to the United States in any way and maybe not even any other country.


 “L is black so it’s okay!”
Is it not highly suspicious that they’ve set it up so that it’s the White Guy With The God Complex versus the Ominous Hooded Black Man? I’m not going to spoil anything, but it doesn’t end well. And according to people who’ve seen the adaptation, it ends worse. A movie about a white boy “cleansing” the American prison system is inherently problematic, because, well. Think about it. America already has a problem with loner white boys who think they can get away with murder.
    “But Light is the villain!”
    I’m going to move around a bit here. Why do people want diversity, especially in movies and television? It’s because diverse people want a narrative that focuses on someone that we can relate to, someone who isn’t a white man.
    The populace tends to attach themselves to the main character - think about all those fangirls who stuck themselves to Light because he’s “hot”. Now think about all the privileged white boys who will watch the movie and project themselves onto the disturbed, lone-wolf mass-murderer who goes about killing people on his own whims.
    Not only that, but societal expectations for white boys in America differ greatly from the pressures that influenced Light’s actions in the manga, and in the movie Light’s character is so vastly different that he doesn’t face any similar pressures at all.
Rewriting Death Note so Light is white and L is black makes it about a white boy with a god complex becoming a serial murderer and evading the justice system while using his connections to try to kill the black genius who’s trying to prevent the world from living in fear of a stranger’s arbitrary judgment. White boy serial killer with god complex murders genius black man. We don’t need this narrative.

So, instead of ruining a well written and thought provoking story about moral ambiguity that relies on the fact that it takes place in Japan, adapt something else. Like Soul Eater, because Soul Eater takes place in Nevada.