I understand the frustration that American media does not show enough portrayals of people of color but its time that people understand that skin color alone is no indication of racial background. Just watch the new PBS show African American Lives just to see how complicated genealogies get. To criticize Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony as not being dark enough because they are Puerto Rican is a laugh. The majority of Puerto Rican families have such diversity that skin color becomes an almost irrelevant issue. Plus many Spanish ancestors of Puerto Ricans were of Arab descent! And Angelina Jolie's character Mariane Pearl could easily pass for white, and Angelina Jolie does have a claim to being of color because of her native ancestry. Naacp however, was recognizing that the story told was of a woman of African descent. Beyonce portrays Alice in the Disney series. If Jessica Biel is embracing her diverse heritage by playing Pocahontas maybe that will make some think about the parameters we set around "race." Its time all Americans reclaim the diversity of our pasts including the many white and black Americans whose ancestors coupled with Native Americans. Race may be skin deep but racial discrimination has a place in the past of many American families.

Ah! Wouldn't it be so nice if race wasn't based on skin color? Unfortunately, that is the way that it is in the united states. The one drop rule lives on, not just for African Americans, but for all people of color. That is what the U.S. is built on...race and skin color. Where do you think terms such as 'mulatto' came from. I remember reading an article by Assata Shakur, and she said when the cops are attacking, they aren't going to be asking, oh, are you part White? Skin color is indicative of race here. I think accurate depictions of characters is very important. The United States as always done a poor job with that. Cleopatra was turned white (being fanned by her BLACK servants), so was jesus...I don't need to go on. Disney is already a white washed industry with the characters put into stereotypical roles and depicted as so. I also suggest you look a little closer at your analysis of Puerto Rico and the issue of skin color there, it is a little lacking.

Sounds like you’re suggesting that Hollywood has embraced an inclusive view of our shared histories by casting actors with mixed backgrounds, but I don’t agree. If Disney finds the room for casting black Beyonce as Alice in Wonderland, I call it a rare act of magnanimous token casting, and not much more.

I’m less interested in shades of skin color, and more concerned with Disney’s conflation of brown people into a homogeneous group. I rarely think casting agents wonder, ‘Is this actor brown enough?’ because I don’t think Disney folks know the difference. You’re either white or not.

While I think it’s a fun party fact to know which celebrities carry a fraction of American Indian blood in them, I doubt this was part of the casting criteria used to hire Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl or Jessica Biel as Pocahontas. Regardless of their actual ancestry, actors who are recognized as white are conferred the privileges that come with the racial association. In the entertainment industry this means they’re unilaterally given casting preference over women of color. The one-drop rule doesn’t apply to white actors here; I don’t think actors like Angelina who are recognized as white but may have more complex ancestry can claim to have legitimacy in portraying the experience of living today as a person of color.

We are a mixed society, to be sure, but the persistence of racial discrimination demands that we look a little harder at who and who isn’t being represented in popular culture. And, even then, embracing our shared ancestry alone is no atonement for the structurally ingrained racial injustices in our social reality and pop culture fantasies.