Race Tropes

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Tropes about race and ethnicity, racial stereotypes, and ethnic conflict as depicted in the media.

Also see Prejudice Tropes. Not to be confused with The Big Race. The Standard Fantasy Races and Loads and Loads of Races are categories of fantasy creatures rather than human ethnic groups.

For an index of tropes about the other kind of race, see Race You to the Index.

Tropes:

• Affirmative-Action Legacy: If involving the white hero gaining a non-white successor.
• Africa Is a Country: Works that treat the entire continent of Africa as one country.
• All Asians Know Martial Arts
• All Chinese People Know Kung-Fu
• All Jews Are Ashkenazi: The stereotype that all Jews are ethnic Ashkenazis from Central/Eastern Europe.
• All Muslims Are Arab: The stereotype that all Muslims are ethnic Arabs or speak Arabic.
• Ambiguously Brown: A character has brown skin but unknown ethnicity.
• "Angry Black Man" Stereotype
• Angry White Man
• Anime Chinese Girl
• Badass Native: Aboriginal/indigenous/native tribespeople are depicted as being more brave and tough than members of more "civilized" foreign nations.
• Balkan Bastard
• Bigot with a Badge: Nothing noble about this racist cop.
• Blackface: A racist performance involving non-black people wearing makeup to look like black people.
• Blackface-Style Caricature: Exaggerated cartoon depictions of black people that resemble blackface.
• Black Republican
• Black Vikings: Characters of a race that is highly unlikely given the work's setting and time period.
• Brownface: A racist performance involving non-brown people wearing makeup to look like "brown people" (anyone with a brownish skin tone that's not black or white).
• Captain Ethnic: A superhero whose theme is their ethnicity or nationality.
• The Chief's Daughter
• Child of Two Worlds
• Chinese Laborer
• Chinese Launderer
• Chocolate Baby: A baby doesn't look much like one or both of their parents, hinting that their mother may have cheated on her husband with the child's real father. The child being a different ethnicity may be an indicator.
• Circassian Beauty
• Color Me Black: A racist gets turned into the very ethnicity they despise.
• Culture Equals Costume
• Dashing Hispanic: A Hispanic man who is very handsome.
• Dehumanizing Insult
• Divine Race Lift: A deity is depicted with a different ethnicity than they are usually depicted as.
• Dragon Lady
• Dub Name Change: A translation of a work changes a character's name.
• Electric Black Guy: A black person with electrical superpowers.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: The villains are willing to hire anyone as their minions, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
• Ethnic God
• Ethnicity Monarch
• Ethnic Magician
• Ethnic Menial Labor
• Ethnic Scrappy: A character is disliked for being an offensive racial stereotype.
• Europeans Are Kinky
• Everything Is Racist: Anything and everything can potentially be misconstrued as racist or otherwise offensive.
• Evil Colonialist (not always but quite often related to race and racism)
• Facial Profiling
• Failing a Taxi
• Fake Mixed Race: A mixed-race character is played by an actor who isn't really mixed race.
• Fake Nationality: An actor plays a character of an ethnicity or nationality that they are not.
• Faux Interracial Relationship
• Fauxreigner: An apparent foreigner is actually someone pretending to be a non-native or a different nationality from the one they actually are.
• Five-Token Band
• Flawless Token: A minority character who never does any wrong and gets better treatment than the other characters.
• Foreign Culture Fetish
• Foreign Ruling Class
• French Jerk: A French person who is very mean.
• Funny Foreigner: A foreign character who provides humor through their bizarre customs and being out-of-touch with the customs of the country they're currently living in.
• Gentile Jew-Chaser
• Germanic Depressives
• Germanic Efficiency
• Gorgeous Gaijin
• Gorgeous Greek
• Half-Breed Angst
• Half-Breed Discrimination: Racism against people who are multiethnic or multiracial.
• Heel–Race Turn
• Heritage Disconnect
• Hiding Your Heritage
• Hollywood Natives: Stereotypical aboriginal/indigenous/native tribespeople.
• Hot Gypsy Woman: Romani women are stereotyped as being beautiful in a very sensual way.
• Humans Are White: Most human characters in a sci-fi/fantasy setting are all members of the exact same race or ethnicity, especially the majority group in the region that the work originated from (such as white people in Western countries).
• Indian Maiden
• Indians and Indians: Gags involving the word "Indian" referring to both people from India and Native Americans.
• Inscrutable Oriental
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Cultural stereotypes of China, Korea, Japan, etc which treat the people from all these different regions as being exactly or mostly the same as each other.
• Interracial Adoption Struggles
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: Future humans of all races will intermingle until there's no distinct races left.
• Intimidating White Presence
• Irishman and a Jew
• Latin Lover
• Latino Is Brown: All Latino characters have brown skin, despite the greater variation in the skin color of real Latinos.
• Like Goes with Like
• Lost Tribe: An extremely isolated ethnic group which lives separately from the rest of global human society.
• Magical Asian
• Magical Jew
• Magical Native American: Indigenous American people are stereotyped as having magical powers or greater spiritual awareness.
• Magical Negro: A Black character who exists only to help the white characters.
• Magical Romani: Romani people are stereotyped as having magical powers, often acting as Fortune Tellers who can also put gypsy curses on their enemies.
• Malcolm Xerox: A character based on Malcolm X.
• Mammy
• Mighty Whitey
• Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow
• Minority Police Officer
• Minority Show Ghetto: A work aimed at a minority group gets less attention and acclaim.
• Minstrel Shows
• Missing White Woman Syndrome
• Mistaken Ethnicity: Incorrectly guessing someone's ethnic/racial heritage.
• Mistaken for Foreigner: Someone is mistakenly assumed to not be a native citizen of their own country, often because they're members of an ethnic minority group full of recent immigrants.
• Mistaken for Racist: A character accidentally says or does something that can be (mis)interpreted as being racist.
• Mistaken for Terrorist: Most variations of this trope involve someone who is of North African / West Asian / South Asian (or otherwise Ambiguously Brown) ethnicity being mistaken for some sort of Middle Eastern Terrorist, regardless of actual racial heritage or ideological beliefs.
• Mistaken Nationality: Incorrectly guessing someone's country of origin.
• Mixed Ancestry Is Attractive: Being mixed race is considered exotic/attractive In-Universe.
• Modern Minstrelsy
• More Diverse Sequel: A sequel can have more racial or ethnic minorities than its predecessor.
• Monochrome Casting: (Almost) every single character looks to be the same race as one another.
• Mukokuseki: Anime characters don't look like any real race.
• Multinational Team: A team of heroes has members from different countries, race or ethnicity.
• The Native Rival
• The Natives Are Restless
• No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel: When a time traveler from the future who happens to be a member of some historically persecuted ethnic group visits the wrong time and place (i.e. a black American at the height of Jim Crow segregation), they're going to get the complete historical racism experience.
• Norse by Norsewest
• No Woman's Land
• N-Word Privileges: The state of being allowed to say a racial slur and how it's mainly acceptable to say only by the people the slur is aimed at.
• One-Drop Rule
• Operator from India
• Orientalism
• Outside/Inside Slur
• Pass Fail
• People of Hair Color
• Persecution Flip
• Phenotype Stereotype
• Piss-Take Rap
• Playing Up the Stereotype: A character pretends to have the stereotypical traits of their race.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy
• Profiling
• Race Lift: The adaptation changes a character's ethnicity.
• Race-Name Basis
• Racial Face Blindness: The racist stereotype that individual people of other races are impossible to tell apart from one another.
• Racially Exclusive Magic
• Racial Remnant
• Racial Transformation: A character's race is changed permanently, or at any rate in a manner more long-term than make-up, using some kind of fantasy or SF mechanism.
• Racist Grandma: An elderly character who is bigoted, and either doesn't know or doesn't care that invokedit is no longer acceptable to openly discriminate against people.
• "Rediscovering Roots" Trip: A character, often a foreign-born immigrant (or descendant of recent immigrants), travels to their family's country of origin.
• Roguish Romani: Stereotypes of nomadic Romani people being thieves and scammers.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most
• Same Race Means Related: Characters of the same ethnic background are assumed or revealed to be related.
• Sassy Black Woman
• Scary Black Man
• Scary Minority Suspect
• Sensual Slavs: Eastern European women are stereotyped as being beautiful in a very seductive way.
• Servant Race
• Sexy Scandinavian
• Shiksa Goddess
• "Signature Sport" Stereotype
• Sizable Semitic Nose: Jews, Arabs, and other Semitic peoples are depicted with large, hooked noses.
• Slave Race
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: Where X is a minority, and the speaker has been accused of racism.
• Son of an Ape: Comparing people to apes, monkeys, or other primates in a dehumanizing way, sometimes in a racist sense.
• Soul Brotha
• Space Jews: A fictional non-human species which resemble a particular stereotype of a real-life human ethnic group.
• Spicy Latina
• Starbucks Skin Scale: Comparing skin color to coffee, or other food/drink.
• Stereotype Flip
• Stereotype Reaction Gag: A minority character gets angry at another character suggesting a stereotype about them before confirming it themselves.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Englishmen cheerily disregarding strife, danger, or despair.
• Suddenly Ethnicity
• Token Enemy Minority: The single member of a hero team who belongs to a race that the team is usually fighting against.
• Token Minority: The only character among the main cast who's a member of a minority ethnic group.
• Token Minority Couple: Two characters who are both minorities start dating.
• Token Trio
• Token White: The only person of European descent among a cast full of non-white people.
• Tonto Talk
• Tribe of Priests
• Twofer Token Minority
• Ugly Slavic Women: Eastern European women are portrayed as ugly.
• Uncle Tomfoolery
• Where da White Women At?: Stereotypes of black men lusting after white women and vice versa.
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
• White Bread and Black Brotha: An Odd Couple consisting of a strait-laced white guy and a streetwise black guy.
• White-Bread Palate: The stereotype that white people have a Plain Palate.
• White Dude, Black Dude
• White Gangbangers: Because not all Gangbangers are black or brown criminals.
• White Guilt
• White Male Lead: Protagonists tend to be white men, regardless of the diversity of the rest of the cast.
• White Man's Burden
• The Whitest Black Guy
• Whoopi Epiphany Speech
• Wild Samoan
• Yellowface: A racist performance involving people who are not East Asian wearing makeup to look like they are.
• Yellow Peril: Xenophobic fears over East Asian people somehow "replacing" or subjugating (white) Western people.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: A bigot gives a backhanded compliment to a minority by saying that they are better than the rest of their kind.
• You Know I'm Black, Right?: Saying something racist in front of someone of that race unknowingly.