Hollywood produced “Becky Sharp,” its first full-length motion picture in color, in 1935. But the Eastern press still hasn’t accepted the reality that the United States isn’t just black-and-white.

The Census Bureau broke the news at the National Press Club March 24 in a room jam-packed with journalists and TV cameras. It announced, with its 2010 tally now in, the U.S. Hispanic population zoomed past the 50-million population mark.

Sharing the day’s ethnic/racial news highlights, The New York Times ran as its No. 2 online headline (behind, of course, another Gaddafi/Libya cliffhanger) ‘Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend.’

As expected, The Washington Post found a spot on page 17 for the Hispanic milestone. It reported in its lead paragraph the unavoidable fact that “young Hispanics and Asians” drove the nation’s population increase,” concluding the lead sentence with “an aging white population was essentially stagnant.” Then it continued, “(T)he statistics underscore the country’s rush toward a day, barely three decades from now, when non-Hispanic whites will be a minority.”

Lo, the poor paleface.

For a quarter of a page, the Post story quoted experts who were anything but Hispanic on the changing demographics. Finally, in its last two sentences, it let Arturo Vargas, executive director of National Association of Hispanic Elected and Appointed Officials, squeeze in that Latinos already comprise nearly one in four of the country’s school-age children and unless we do a better job of educating them today, “we’re putting at risk this country’s economic success tomorrow.”

Eastern media’s denial of the existence of Mexican Americans, who make up about two-thirds of the country’s 50 million Hispanics, is legendary in the Southwest. So is the federal government’s lack of interest in hiring them as part of its 2.7 million civil service workforce. Now 16.3% of the U.S. population, Hispanics comprise only 7.5% of those holding such jobs with Uncle Sam.

THE FAT PLAGUE: Print this column and attach it to your refrigerator door while you reach in for that leftover slice of strawberry cheesecake or a second helping of Ben & Jerry’s chunky monkey ice cream, topped with a maraschino cherry.

It’s okay.

Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar has found that there’s a virus, ad-36, that causes obesity. Accept his revolutionary theory and your feelings of glutton-guilt will shrivel as your waistline does likewise.

Hispanic Link’s lead syndicated columnist José de la Isla encountered Doctor D the other day while indulging in cajeta in Mexico City. He had surfed into a BBC site where he was confronted with the question, “Have you seen Channel 4’s Fat Plague?”

He hadn’t. But he was certainly aware that we Hispanics are disproportionately susceptible to obesity and diabetes.

Dr Dhurandhar first formed his ideas in India where his father started an obesity clinic in the 1960s, José learned. Daddy D pioneering the obesity study and his son Nikhil is carrying on his work.

“Dhurandhar says he has tested ad-36 on a small number of obese Americans, and found that 30% of them have antibodies for ad-36, which would suggest that at some time or other all have been infected by what he calls the fat plague virus.

“Despite the impressive amount of data he has acquired, the scientific community remains deeply skeptical,” José was informed by the BBC blog. “The program screens both overweight and thin volunteers to assess whether they carry antibodies to the virus and whether it might have spread to the UK.”

In forwarding the report along to Sin Pelos, de la Isla added no cautionary note or endorsement of his own, other than to mention that a couple of decades back, ulcers were a major national worry, and the only accepted way to prevent them was to stop worrying.

Then medical science came up with an antibiotic or bandage or something, and ulcers are no longer viewed as a national plague.

If Dr. Dhurandhar does come up with a pill or elixir that can attack the fat virus, let us pray that he doesn’t share his discovery with that jolly fellow who visits us on Dec. 25. What child would want to perch on the boney knee of an anorexic St. Nick?