I read an interesting article once written by the writer and director of Akeelah and the Bee that I wish I could find, but I can't, so I'll just detail it for you. He had won the Nicholl's Fellowship for his screenplay, but had trouble finding funding for the movie. He had actually had quite a few offers from studios, but turned them down. Why? They wanted to change Akeelah's teacher (Who was eventually played by Laurence Fishburne) from a black man, to a white man. Studios told him that the movie would be accepted much stronger by audiences if Akeelah, the 11-year-old black girl who goes to a predominately black school in South L.A. was mentored by a white man, rather than a black man. The writer turned down every offer until he finally found one that would let him retain the written race of his characters.
But the whole inner-city black kid being mentored to greatness with the help of a well-off white person is an extremely common find. Even in the film Precious (Which to me had a strong feeling of racism inherent in it) was struck with this problem in a way. One of the first lines of the movie is Precious saying that she wants to get a "light-skinned boyfriend", which kind of starts you off with an odd feeling, but you figure at some point in time she will get over her obsession with the skin color of her future significant other. Instead, you find that every single person who shows Precious any amount of affection in the film, has considerably lighter skin than her (Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Paula Patton). While every person that fucks her over have the same skin tones as Precious.
Normally, I'd feel I was being far too nitpicky if I was critiquing the casting in terms of skin tone. But in a movie that draws such an importance to race, that has comments about things such as the light-skinned boyfriend, I don't think it's too ridiculous to pay attention to things such as this. Especially when it's something that happens in almost every similar movie. But who knows, maybe I'm the racist one.
Though, when it comes to The Blind Side, I don't have any problems with it because A. it's a true story, and B. at least from the trailers (I have not seen it), it doesn't seem to be focused too much on race, and more on poverty. Though I could be wrong.
