Because it is not the character Ian Fleming wrote about.
It's really no more than that. You could make him British with Chinese ancestry and my argument would not change a jot my friend. I think that's what seperates it from being a race issue. If I said "anything but Chinese", that would be racist and bigoted for sure. As I have been trying to say, "because he is black" is not the reason I have a problem, it's because it is -not- the James Bond the Author wrote.
I would be just as pissed is the dancing Cat to my left was changed into a white guy, they may be able to -play- the Cat, Hell, they may do it better than Danny, but it is not the cat as written by Grant Naylor.
The argument is not one of race but allowing for the artistic integrity of the Original author to stand.
What colour is Huckleberry Finn?
We know his father is white, what about his mother?
If anyone wants to troll the book for evidence:
http://contentserver.adobe.com/store/books/HuckFinn.pdf
The argument as given is "the absence of proof means that it could be true", and that just isn't a good argument.
It's not so much that Fleming "did not care about ethnicity"
it was just as you say, par for the course for a white male writer of the time. It would not even entered his head that he would have to describe what "colour" Bond was. Authors of the time only bothered to describe "race" when it was -not- white.
Again it's not a question of not caring, it a question of "the standard" of the day.
IS what colour Bond is central to his personality? No, not really, because Fleming never really gave him a great personality anyway, concentrating more on the action. Does anything in his scant personality indicate he could possibly be a person -other- than white, not at all.