Roberto da Costa has one of the longest lists of inconsistent (and often whitewashed) art in Marvel Comics, honestly.
He’s a biracial Black and Portuguese Brazilian dude who takes after his father…
…And yet he is all too frequently subjected to skin lightening and hair straightening by artists. (As well as just like, entire facial restructure. I seriously will never get past how much he looks like Bruce Wayne in New Avengers.)
Sunspot was created during a time when Claremont started to say “fuck metaphors” and write stories directly involving racism. (Some pretty good, some absolute trash, but that’s neither here nor there.) The amount of Latine/Hispanic superheroes that existed could be counted off with a single hand, (not that there are a hell of a lot more since,) and creating a character like Bobby brings new rep and new voices into the X-Men. Bobby makes his way through the world with a number of labels; Black, Latino, Mutant, and it gets complicated for him sometimes. They can intertwine with each other; his mutant powers manifested under duress from the racism he was facing. It’s something that a lot of readers can relate to. (It’s also not the entirety of his character, but rather just a piece of it.) It makes all the things he overcomes so much more powerful; this is a boy who grows up to be a major Avengers player, despite so many people telling him he was destined to be a villain just like his father. But his whitewashing really subtracts from all that.
It also really pisses me off when people cherry-pick whitewashed art and use it as a defence for whitewashed casting in the X-Men movies. (He’s been played by two different actors at this point, neither of which are Black.) It’s comparing whitewashing to whitewashing.
And I would just like to remind everyone that the full blame for this huge phenomenon far beyond just him cannot be put on the artists, but editors, too. (See: Lighten Up by Ronald Wimberly)