It's a story about the Greeks going to war for a woman who was the personification of all the Greek people. She was the Queen of Sparta. To imagine her as anything other than Greek is going too far.
Eartha Kitt played Helen of Troy on stage for Orson Welles in 1950. Doesn't seem to have harmed their reputations, the legacy of the play they performed, or Western culture at large in the slightest.
