For those who have issues with the son not looking mixed

Agreed. I used to babysit for a couple--the husband white, the wife is half-black and half-white. Their daughter looks half-black/half-white, but the son is VERY aryan looking (white, light blonde hair, blue eyes). His father doesn't even look that white. Whenever the son calls to his mother, people give them a weird stare (little white kid saying mom to a half-black woman with big, curly hair). Or guys will come up to her and hit on her, not realizing that she's the mother, not the nanny.
The brother (half-black/half-white) married a white woman, and they have very white looking twin boys as well.
Also, my sister's friend, who is Laotian, is married to a red-headed white man. Their two boys don't look Asian at all. They're both red-headed and look very white
Take it from me. Ethnicity/genetics is not as clear cut as you think. I think the problem with a lot of white people in America is that they're not around enough diversity to know. They only take what they see from TV/movies as reality and like to put people in nice little boxes.
I get approached all of the time about my ethnicity. Mexicans speak to me in Spanish, thinking I'm Latina. I guess not a lot of people here are used to seeing Southeast Asians. If you're Asian, you're either Chinese or Japanese--and people will approach you all of the time asking you what your ethnicity is because they've never seen an Asian like you before (this is the story of my life).

i also believe this boy was cast due to his resemblance to Simon Pegg.

Since Gordon (was that his name? Fatboy's friend?) was Libby's cousin, I have to assume that Libby's dad was white, making the kid only one quarter black.

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Why do Americans insist on calling any black person outside of America "African American".

They are NOT American!

Take Padma Laxmi for example, she's got only Indian ancestry but her little daughter looks 100% Caucasian
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/03/18/article-0-08C45FC4000005DC-3 20_468x609.jpg
http://blogs.babble.com/famecrawler/files/2010/10/45975PCN_Padma01-e12 86850382399.jpg

It's all the work of dominant genes

~love is all we need~

I know this thread is a couple of months old, but I have to say, one of my favorite things about RFBR is the spot-on casting as far as what mixed people really look like. Newton is black/white biracial, as is her character -- there's no doubt, we see her parents. If her son also looked biracial, it wouldn't be totally unrealistic (mixed genes are unpredictable) -- but many many 1/4 black, 3/4 white (quadroons) appear white. When you hear stories of black people "passing" in the old days, they were usually quadroons who really did look totally white, but were 100% black according to the One Drop Rule. Today quadroons "pass" all the time... it's just not an issue because there's no legal reason (slavery is a thing of the past and they have interracial marriage rights regardless) for a mixed person to say they're 100% black. My son is quadroon, and though he hangs out with black kids at school, none of them consider him black, and neither does he, no matter how much I tell him he has a right to claim his Black blood.

Honestly, as a biracial (Black/German-American) married to an Irish-American, I had no idea I would give birth to a dirty-blonde haired, white skinned kid. Neither did my parents -- they avoided giving me blonde baby dolls when I was little because they thought it was unrealistic. So I don't hold it against anyone who thinks the son in the movie is unrealistic -- but, really, he isn't. And for me, it's awesome that a movie actually shows it as it is, not the way people THINK it is.

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