Light-skinned Beauty Pass?

I'm not sure why but, Clay Cane's got the light-skin starlets, actresses and singers on his mind this week.  "There are color barriers in entertainment ," he says, "and it's less accepted for dark-skinned people (especially women) to be considered beautiful."  He is fair-minded and prefaces his comment by stating: "this post is not to say that all light-skinned people in the entertainment industry are successful simply because of their complexion."  Oh good.  That means this won't be one of those tragic mulatta rants he's expecting to get.  Instead, I just want to weigh-in on how messed up the entertainment industry is for ALL of us: light-skin and dark-skin performers.  During the years I was auditioning, I was never dark enough to "play" the black girlfriend, sister, wife.  My blackness didn't "read" to the audience.  Instead, I was sent in for hot Latina: Puerto Rican, Mexican, you take your pick.  No matter that my (very rusty) Spanish was Castilian--they wanted the "fire" they saw in that wavy haired girl.  Of course, I was terrible at that--fire is not my thing.  I struggled a lot during those years of auditioning, and did my best to "present" myself as the race I was supposed to portray.  But how do you present the thing about you that is just the "you" of you?  Light-skinned beauty pass?  I don't know--that any of these women were cast as "black" seems like a small miracle in an industry when it is still white people--who may or may not have a familiarity with the wide-ranging hues of black folks (not to mention the multiracial ones).