21

Perhaps by wanting to avoid stereotyping Asian-Americans as really good at math, the producers of 21 just got rid of them all together. The movie, based on real-life MIT students who counted cards in Las Vegas, cast the almost exclusively Asian-American blackjack team with almost exclusively white actors. When media outlets started reporting outrage at the castings, producer Dana Brunetti said she would have “LOVED” to cast Asian actors as the leads, but that there weren’t enough bankable names. This, in turn, is because people like Brunetti won’t cast Asians as their film’s leads. And round and round we go.