I also suspected Dean Cain might be Eurasian when I saw the Lois and Clark series, and confirmed it later. However, I never got that vibe from Mark Paul Gosselaar, even after seeing his photo with his mother – his mother is the one who is Eurasian looking.
I used to participate in multiracial forums, and nearly all multiracial part-Asian people said the same thing.

@poetess

I was surprised to learn that he was mixed race. Unless they have the clearly east asian eyes, half-asian half-white folks typically look white. I recently learned that the Tilly sisters (Jennifer & Meg) were half Chinese.

I guess most people don’t have good Eurasian radar – I thought the Tilly sisters were part East Asian, part Caucasian the first second I saw them. Later I learned their original surname was Chan, which seemed to suggest which of their parents was Asian.
I think the problem is that most people tend to categorize people into monoracial categories at the first moment and ignore all the other clues. Then they get upset if the person does not conform somehow to the category that they assigned them to.

Keanu and Johnny won’t complain about being considered white, because it means they bypass ethe “ethnic” roles and are given many mainstream roles.

DDK:
That is not the point, the point is that since it’s inception, Hollywood has always used allegedly “white” actors and actresses with a little something extra racially to promote and define the boundaries of “whiteness” and it is usually borrowed heavily from black culture. Mae West for example who was of black blood and had a persona derived heavily from black culture, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Merle Oberon who was Sri Lankan and British, her mother used to pretend to be her maid. Now Hollywood is passing on this tradition in it’s “representation” of the black race, more often that not a “black” male character in a Hollywood feature film will be married to a white or non-black woman, black woman, who r invisible in hollywood will be represented by “bi-racial” women, the most desirable black woman in Hollywood and like Lena Horne, is rarely seen on-camera is Halle Berry who is the off-spring of an African-American father and a White British Mother.These Actors and Actresses represent the desire and the ability for the non-white masses to be re-classified as caucasians no matter how dubious their bloodlines are..Are U exotic and have that undefinable exotic factor that launches a million fantasies all over this globe, like Vin Diesel who is so obviously black it’s a joke when he says he is half-italian and “other”.. I have never heard this man admit to being black, then Hollywood can “use” u to push the boundaries of what “white” is..

Black militants. Notice that whenever the topic of “passing for white” comes up, the person who raises the issue is almost always black. Furthermore, this person usually pretends that whites are really concerned about “infiltration” by these “passers” and that they themselves are against the One Drop Rule and view it as racist. In reality, the opposite is generally the case. The most hardcore one-droppists in the United States are black. BTW, ODR is an example of what Hitler referred to as the politics of the “Big Lie”, in this case the bizarre notion that someone of predominantly European ancestry who looks white is actually black.

FG,

Okay, what I was trying to argue is that there is an ongoing campaign to suppress mixed individuals who are phenotypically white or close to white.

Who runs that campaign? Blacks, or whites?

Exactly. People who live in mono-race world tend to do this. Because they are so familiar with seeing people of their own race AND NOBODY ELSE, they notice every person of another race and tend to believe there are more of them than there actually is.

Personally, it made me believe there were more blacks in America than there actually is. I thought that at least 40% of Americans were black.

Now, I don’t know about America, but in my culture, it’s the same with Asians, but not “Latinos” because they are most often seen as white.

It’s also not a good thing and I’m trying to get rid of it, but it’s difficult.

I’m not sure that makes much sense. What kind of tangible negative effects can minority communities have on “white-looking people”? If anything, it seems like the opposite–White people by and large have the power to exclude those people from the film industry (or whatever) and might do so because they worry about them “playing the [Black, Latino, Asian] card” or some nonsense. White people in particular seem very unsettled when they can’t “figure people out” (and that doesn’t just apply to people of mixed backgrounds). Given that they don’t want to be labelled “racist” (whether they say/do something racist or not), a self-identified non-White person penetrating the White club is a threat to their image as color-blind WIWLs.

What you just described (noticing more than 2 Black characters and seeing that as “many”) has been scientifically demonstrated and proves your point. People are more likely to overestimate the proportion of Blacks (I don’t know if the study has been replicated with other groups) in a given sample precisely because they are used to seeing so few. It seems like the fact that you can point to a couple standout examples demonstrates (in the laymen’s sense) that there aren’t very many. Even when you compare actors, someone like Kathy Griffin (who’s supposedly on the D-list), is still probably more well-known than Viola Davis (an Oscar nominee).

But you seem to believe that black people are those who “don’t let them” be mixed. Or am I missing something here?”

Okay, what I was trying to argue is that there is an ongoing campaign to suppress mixed individuals who are phenotypically white or close to white. Due to white people’s domination of society, such individuals are often viewed as a potential threat by conventional minorities and anything that makes them more socially mainstream (like starring in a movie) is seen as problematic for this reason.