Surprise, minorities: Hollywood doesn't like casting us as leads in films, even if that means completely shifting around facts to accommodate white actors.

Although director Spike Lee just dressed down the wizened Clint Eastwood for not including black extras in his WWII dramas, a new ABC News article takes issue with the way Hollywood consistently uses whites to fill major roles written for blacks, Hispanics and Asians. To wit:

In the new movie "Stuck," which opened last week, actress Mena Suvari plays a young woman named Brandi, who, after a night of partying, strikes a homeless man with her car, sending him through her windshield, and leaves him to die.

The plot is based on the real-life story of Texas woman Chante Mallard…

Mallard is African-American. Suvari, the blonde, blue-eyed beauty from "American Beauty" and the "American Pie" movies, is not. But she does wear cornrows to play the role of Brandi.

Also recently manipulated to remove minorities was 21, the story of an MIT "whiz kid" who went to Vegas and made a killing counting cards. In reality, the student is Asian American, but a white Englishman was cast to play him.

To get an explanation about why minority actors and actresses are being neglected in favor of whites, do what you do every time you have a question about this really demented world: follow the money:

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According to the US Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for black teens is six times the national average, and almost 300,000 African American kids are actively seeking low-skill jobs for the upcoming summer and beyond. But many black teens looking for work in California have been caught off guard by a harsh new reality: if you don't speak Spanish, oftentimes you aren't finding minimum-wage employment.

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Despite being the largest minority group in America, no Hispanic person has ever made it into the final four of the program American Idol, a contest that relies on viewer votes to choose its winners. Black performers, however, have been favorites every season, even winning the show three times.

We don't watch AI, but a blogger who does claims one of this season's top black contestants, Syesha, has intentionally been "looking less Black and more Hispanic," despite the unsuccessful history of Latinos on American Idol.

She has been straightening her hair, wearing lighter colors and featuring her [Hispanic] dad more than her [black] mom on her video vignettes. Sure, it hasn't been a straight line or anything but clearly it has been happening.

Is Syesha really doing this? If so, why? Have black American Idol contestants been significantly better than Hispanic ones? Do Hispanics even watch the fucking show? In the words of a man who wouldn't have been caught dead on American Idol: What's going on?

I've never been one to care that blacks are not the "majority" minority, a distinction that has belonged to Hispanics for quite some time, mainly because the size of our population does not accurately indicate the historical, economic, and cultural importance that we have in this country. According to Black Enterprise, the latest census results do nothing to damage our "clout."

But despite the numbers, "African Americans probably have quite a bit more political influence for a couple of reasons," says David A. Bositis, senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "One is that about a third of Hispanics aren't citizens so they can't vote. A second thing is half of all Hispanics live in just two states - Texas and California. If you look at the other states in the south, African Americans are a much more influential block than Hispanics are."

African Americans trail Latinos in other Census surveys as well. While 49.7 percent of Latinos owned their own homes in 2006, only 47.9 African Americans owned their own homes. Likewise more Latinos were business owners in 2002 - the last Census figures available. Median African-American income also falls behind that of Latinos. In 2005, the median income for African Americans was $30,858 while the median income for Latinos was $35,967.

Despite the lower numbers in the African-American community, the true economic impact differs by region, says Jeffrey M. Humphreys, director of the Selig Center at the University of Georgia.

The fact that the "importance" of each race is measured in part by how much money they can spend makes me want to gag, but I understand that this is America, and our country thrives on capitalism. But if we still maintain some sort of clout, as this article suggests, over Hispanics, where does that leave them?

[BE]

Now that racial and ethnic minorities take up a third of the country's population, does the word "minority" really apply anymore? I guess we've got to wait until we reach 51 percent for a change that big. At this rate, that change will definitely come. The stats are after the jump.

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