What a red herring. Whether or not the photographer controls the dynamic range of the film has nothing to do with whether the range is wide enough or whether the film has a density curve suitable for photographing a black person.
That is, I'm mostly inclined to agree with you. But I also trusted a ton of the other discussion I've seen on this. Which seems to be largely in agreement that film itself had to change to get good pictures of darker skinned people.
I got the impression that if you go with black and white, you dodge many of these problems, amusingly. But adding color to the mix makes things very difficult.