Huh? I thought most it was about their race/ethnicity. Harold was being bullied by the white dudes in his office. Kumar was rebelling against the expectation that he would go to medical school and become a doctor (even though he was well-suited to it). Harold didn’t want to go to the meeting at Princeton because he thought it would be full of overachieving Asian clones. The “extreme sports” dudes called Kumar “Apu.”
Did they? I haven’t seen it, either. I thought they weren’t going to mention it at all.
Like when Ian Malcolm had a black daughter in Jurassic Park: the Lost World. One brief mention and they never came back to it.
I recently watched the movie The Perfect Guy, which was a run-of-the-mill stalker thriller with all black leads, but nothing in the plot or dialog would change if the leads were any other race.
Most of the examples given are either action movies or comedies. Where the diversity is noticeably lacking is family dramas like Ordinary People or American Beauty.
As I say, I didn’t see the movie either, so I don’t know for sure. The adoption thing was what I had heard beforehand.
I notice no one who has seen the film is eagerly jumping forward to clear things up, which probably says something about how badly that movie tanked. 
Well, there’s Will Smith in SEVEN POUNDS. And while there’s an action scene in FLIGHT, it’s mostly just Denzel Washington doing fairly serious drama.
I just thought of ‘Night Of The Living Dead.’
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I watched this. It is truly terrible. There was some brief conversation between the father and Johnny Storm about their family dynamics, but to be honest, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I think the gist was a blended family, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Burn somebody enough and EVERYONE looks black…
Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda.
A heck of a lot of English movies and TV shows manage to cast Black actors in roles where race is a total irrelevance and never even mentioned. This despite the fact that a majority of English people are not Black.
Which I think highlights what the OP is talking about. An British movie like 28 Days Later or a major TV show like Dr Who or Red Dwarf can cast Black actor into a leading role and with no mention of the race of the actor. And as a result, within about 5 minutes the audience has forgotten that the character is Black, and as a result more Black actors get cast.
In contrast, it seems like most times that a Black character gets cast in a US production, it has to be highlighted. Even if it’s completely irrelevant to the show and the character, the race of the character has to be highlighted in some way. Often that is fairly low key, but the character always seems to have to draw attention to their racial background: a throwaway line about growing up in the hood, a joke about black people fitting in somewhere etc. Presumably this is done to highlight how wonderful the production team was for hiring Black person.
As a result, watching US movies the audience are often not allowed allowed to simply accept that a Black actor is playing a character. A Black actor is always playing a Black character. A White actor is playing a bank robber or a doctor or a parent. A Black actor is almost always playing a Black bank robber or a Black doctor or a Black parent.
Is it that much better in the UK? I was curious, and when I googled, I came upon articles like Morgan Freeman: Why black actors quit Britain, and Lenny Henry calls for law to boost low numbers of black people in TV industry.
Also, if race is mentioned, it’s not always to highlight how wonderful it is that a non-white person was cast. There are some different things that a white person and non-white person face when going through life, and it’s not unrealistic to notice them in a movie or TV show. But also not all movies and TV shows are going for complete realism, or even much realism in some cases, and so there are plenty of times that race should be unremarked upon.
Michael B. Jordan has been cast to star in a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, which originally starred Steve McQueen, and then Pierce Brosnan in the first remake.
Too often white is treated as “non-racial” or the default race. If a movie is about random characters where neither race nor national origin is a factor, we usually see white actors fill the void. I’d like to see more of this defaulting to non-white actors for more movies, if only to push that topic off of the minds of people through repetitive saturation
Imagine if Mad Max was all Asian and black actors. Its a future dystopia, there’s no countries anymore, why should pretty much everyone be white? Or a movie like Insidious, or Limitless with all India actors
It should also be noted that a lot of “black” movies aren’t about race, but are still “black culture oriented”. The themes are universal, but the dialogue and other elements speak to a specific subculture.
The movie “Soul Food”, for instance. The story is universal enough (family struggles to stick together after the matriarch dies). But it wouldn’t be the same movie without all the nods to African American culture and the dialogue rife with black expressions. The same with “Waiting to Exhale”.
Then there’s the subtext piece. Take the movie “Set It Off”. You could tell the same story with white women, I guess. But the movie is about a group of friends at the bottom rung of society taking revenge on the system. You’d lose some poignancy by casting white women in those roles, I think.
I think it would be fine if movies just bothered to have realistic depictions. Recently I saw the movie Project Almanac. It’s set in Atlanta, GA. Not the suburbs, but the city proper.
Why is the student body at the high school overwhelmingly white? Perhaps it was an exclusive private school, but I think not since the protagonist was presumably from a financially struggling family. I think I only saw one black person in the entire movie.
I don’t know why they didn’t just set the movie in a fictional town.
When “Best Man Holiday” came out, USA Today called it a “race themed movie” even though race wasn’t a theme of the movie; it was just that a lot of the cast was black. My guess is that a lot of people see a non-white character (or multiple non-white characters) and assume that race will be the central issue of the movie. Or they can only see an “everyman” character if the actor playing that person is white.
In addition to some of the ones listed above: “The Fast & Furious” franchise has multi-racial leads. “Last Holiday” and “Best Man”
“Forgetting” that the character is Black is not a good thing. Do you routinely forget that characters are male when the plots aren’t about gender?
When the new Doctor Who series began with Christopher Eccleston, it seemed to me to have a much larger number of interracial couples than you usually see. It’s been so long since I watched the show that I can only name a couple of examples, the first that comes to mind being Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith from the very first episode, before Rose starts traveling with the Doctor. But it seemed like just about every situation in which a couple was needed, they would cast different races, and never remark upon it, which seemed at the time at least somewhat progressive.
My opinion is that the specific criticisms there are wide of the mark. You could equally ask why Dominic West had to go to the USA to find success. Patrick Robinson is a better actor than most soap actors (I have seen him on stage with the RSC), but he never had the kind of impact in his TV role(s) to guarantee himself a long and prominent career in TV.
I think a genuine problem is that the BBC does sometimes engage in box-ticking tokenism and it will push the careers of certain actors/performers from certain groups. However the problem with this kind of box-ticking is that it doesn’t matter if the person in question is actually has the talent and/or the ability to stand out in the right way to succeed. This can mean that some of the most talented performers from those groups get overlooked because that box has already been ticked.
I’d say that the UK has never had the same issue with ‘interracial couples’ (to be honest I can’t even take the term seriously!) as the US. One of my sets of great-great-great grandparents were an ‘interracial couple’ (Indian and English) in mid-Victorian London for example. I won’t lie and say there have never been issues , but the vast majority accept that black and white people (for example) will date/marry/etc as a mundane fact.