Speaking as a fair-weather Jew:

Everybody knows the Jews run Hollywood. Everybody also knows that the Jews are a bunch of avaricious opportunists, and if there was money to be made turning James Bond into a pedophile we'd do it. What, then, is the profit motive behind the lily-white casts of nearly all Hollywood movies these days?

Something Hollywood doesn't want you to know is that the United States is now somewhere between 25% and 50% of their revenues. The rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - counts for the rest. And the rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - does not want to see black people.

Unless it's Will Smith. No one is sure why, exactly, but Asian audiences are totally cool with Will Smith. Anybody else? fuggedaboudit.

Is it racism if you can't profit off of black people, as opposed to racist because you don't like black people? I'd say yes. But no matter how colorblind the United States gets (and it doesn't look like it is, does it?), film will get whiter and whiter and whiter so long as Hollywood depends on large Asian markets to pay for its films. Effectively, a black James Bond loses half its revenue. A black James Bond effectively loses a third of its revenue if it doubles its US revenue... and Americans are more likely to watch Larry the Cable Guy as James Bond than Idris Elba.

You see the worst places for black people to travel. Hollywood sees markets. Remember, Nintendo is Japanese.

Yes, I'm saying America is less racist than you think because the rest of the world is MORE racist than you think, and I recognize that it's shitty. I'd totally watch Elba play Bond; I'd watch him play Thomas Jefferson. And that's the difference - there's an outside chance for blacks in American media for consumption by Americans and it's a chance worth striving for. That's how Annie ended up black: foreign markets give two shits about christmas movies and Annie is a purely American property with no international tail. But as American audiences pay less and less attention to gigantic blockbusters...

....well, let's just say Idris has less and less chance of headlining Transformers 7 or whatever.