Apparently, the ones who brought up the issue were not concerned citizens, but wood and chocolate manufacturers.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-f...
"In the early days of color film, the color balance of the film’s processing chemicals were made with the primary consumer market in mind–which, at the time, was predominately light skinned individuals. “For many decades, chemicals that would bring out various reddish, yellow, and brown tones were largely left out,” explains the video’s narrator."
source: http://www.diyphotography.net/history-of-how-film-camera-tec...
The video has some pretty interesting details.
If you have say mixed race models or models of a race you're not familiar with, it would be worse than useless. Somebody with east asian features but western european skin tone would throw off an entire movie.
AKA 'Never The Same Color'
The techs at the TV station would adjust the transmission so skin tones 'looked right' and left it at that.
> By the 1990s, it was finally dawning on film creators and processors, too, that using a white-skinned person as the universal standard was short-changing people of every other skin tone.
I don't quite understand this statement. The point of the China Girl was having a fairly agreed upon color to make sure the film was developed properly.
As long as you were pretty sure what the color was supposed to be, you could kind of judge how good the film was.
Introducing other ethnicities would defeat the purpose.