This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Lale: The token-white-subversion is up to four examples. Anyone else think Token White is worthy of its own trope?
Filby: Took out The Order Of The Stick. Roy's whole family are recurring characters, and Sabine is black too, not to mention the very large number of Asian characters as well. Roy may be the only black main character, but it's never commented on, and there are exactly two white main (human) characters. So... I don't think it's an example.
Cy: Would this qualify for a Truth in Telivision? For instance, some colleges have been known to digitally edit photos
◊ to make their campus seem more diverse.
BRPXQZME: This troper wouldn't dare add it to the entry because putting it any way other than tactfully will hit someone's nerves, but he attended a certain (semi-prestigious) high school where there were so few black and hispanic students, some were referred to as tokens (only as a joke, of course; well near all of them were the kind of bright, intelligent folks who could get past the admissions process like any other student at the school). The "majority" demographics are white and asian (this troper belongs to both... he guesses). It's a contentious NIMBY-esque topic in the county's politics....
Kilyle: Why is this a redirect from The Other White Religion? I don't understand what that phrase is supposed to mean.
Matthew The Raven: Jews. I know, it's stupid.
Superluser: As the person who suggested the title The Other White Religion, I'd like to place this in some context. That title was supposed to be You Have to Have Jews. Yeah. It seemed a lot like What are all these Jews doing in my favorite TV shows?, and when it became clear that this would become a trope whether people liked it or not, I tried to make darned sure that the trope would be as circumscribed as possible—dealing with one specific issue that wouldn't become a Teh Jooos trope—and to come up with a less flamebait title. Here's what I said in the YKTTW:
- But there's the other issue that Hinduism and Islam and Buddhism and Sikhism are seen as foreign religions, practiced by characters who have entirely too much melanin...Judaism, on the other hand is The Other White Religion (and I propose this as a slightly less flamebait title for this trope). Western Jews are typically of European descent and are indeed usually white, which makes people more comfortable with seeing Jews than other religions.
The trope name is supposed to be slightly offensive to the suits who don't really understand what Judaism is about or even that it differs in any meaningful way from mainline Protestant Christianity. I don't defend the original trope (it's either a trope or it isn't, but even if it is, there are some tropes we don't have)
