History Main / BlackVikings

This trope can have a [[UnfortunateImplications touchy relationship]] with tropes like PlaysGreatEthnics; for instance, it's not uncommon (especially in US productions) to cast black actors to portray North African peoples such as the Berbers,[[note]]Which is quite wrong. Thanks in part to the long history of Mediterranean trade and the travel barrier of the Sahara desert, North African populations are ethnically and culturally distinct from Sub-Saharan Africans, to the point that in some European languages "White Africa" is a synonym of "North Africa" (though the term is rarely used today).[[/note]] to the objections of those who feel misrepresented as much as they would by having a European actor play the same role (with the additional irony that southern Europeans like Italians and Spaniards sometimes resemble Northern Africans enough to belivably pass as them).[[note]]This goes back to the ancient times, as while Mediterranean civilizations were often enormously different in cultural terms, ethnically wise they could be often very hard to tell apart, which is, for instance, the whole joke of Roman playwright Creator/{{Plautus}}'s play ''Poenulus''. Add in the Carthaginian and Muslim conquests of Hispania and the mix goes even higher.[[/note]]

It is possible that when a Black Viking appears in film or TV, the character is not intended to be seen as the same race as the actor. [[AbilityOverAppearance The actor used might have simply been the best available for the role]], and the writers are merely asking us to use our imagination to make the actor's physical appearance fit the character's. This is actually standard doctrine for modern stage theatrical productions as is called "non-traditional" or [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour-blind_casting colour-blind casting,]] referring to "the casting of ethnic minority and female actors in roles where race, ethnicity, or sex is not germane", in other words, where it is not relevant to the plot; Theatre/{{Othello}} can never be played by a white actor again, for instance, because his blackness (or [[AmbiguouslyBrown Moorishness,]] in any case) is central to the plot, and {{blackface}} has understandably fallen out of vogue. (Aside from special productions like one with Creator/PatrickStewart in the title role, with Othello being a white guy while every other character [[PersecutionFlip is black]]).

Administrivia/NoRealLifeExamplesPlease. This is strictly a casting trope and not intended for use to describe historical figures.

* Theatre in general, per convention, makes much heavier use of WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief, and the audience knows and accepts it. When characters are unable to recognise voices in order to make ''quiproquos easy'', or when two characters talk loud enough for the audience to hear but the character next to them cannot hear them unless he/she is directly looking at them to show he/she is listening, or when holding a prop dagger is not needed for Juliet to stab herself because she can just mime it, then a character's supposed ethnicity/gender being conform to the actor's is the least of the audience's concerns.

* Increasingly common in theater nowadays, in America and the UK. Many productions of Shakespeare in the UK are colorblind, which aside from historical accuracy sometimes results in some unlikely familial relations (cousins or even siblings being different races, etc).

* In ''FanFic/AThingOfVikings'', a WesternAnimation/HowToTrainYourDragon fanfic that puts the events of the first HTTYD film in real-life history and [[AlternateHistory letting the consequences explode from there]], one member of the [[CadreOfForeignBodyguards Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire]] (Gudmund Hallvarsson) is a literal Black Viking--an Afro-Norse warrior who is the child of a retired Varangian who returned to Sweden a generation earlier with an African concubine.

* Franchise/WonderWoman: The first example of this trope in the series was the [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Silver Age]] character ComicBook/{{Nubia}} who was Diana's long lost, black sister who was also made of clay but was kidnapped by ComicBook/{{Ares|DC}}. Since the Perez run [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1987 from the 1980s]], the Amazons of Themyscira have been shown as being a multi-racial society with Amazons from Europe, East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There is also a separate tribe of mostly black and Arab Amazons called the Bana-Mighdall which ComicBook/{{Artemis}} comes from.

* A late-1990s multimedia ad campaign for Three Musketeers candy bars portrayed the Musketeers in claymation and comic book art. One of the Musketeers was black. Later commercials replaced the short white Musketeer with a [[RaceLift short Latino]]. Alexandre Dumas was himself one-quarter black, though he lived 200 years after the events of his story.

* There is a long-standing Christian tradition that the Three Kings are of multiple ethnicities, although there is no consensus as to which. Legend has it that is because they were from each continent. It is very common in Latin America and Spain to represent one of the Three Wise Men as African (one is generally represented as blonde or redhead, thus Europe, the other as Middle Eastern, thus Asia) - (Caspar is from Anatolia, Melchior is from Arabia, and Balthazar is from Yemen). (Or Melchior is Persian, Caspar is Indian, Balthazar is Ethiopian.) In the actual New Testament account, they aren't kings (they are wise men, Magi), they come together from the East (generally thought to be Persia), and there aren't necessarily three of them (no specific number is given).

This trope can have a [[UnfortunateImplications touchy relationship]] with tropes like PlaysGreatEthnics; for instance, it's not uncommon (especially in US productions) to cast black actors to portray North African peoples such as the Berbers,[[note]]Thanks in part to the long history of Mediterranean trade and the travel barrier of the Sahara desert, North African populations are ethnically and culturally distinct from Sub-Saharan Africans, to the point that in some European languages "White Africa" is a synonym of "North Africa" (though the term is rarely used today)[[/note]] to the objections of those who feel misrepresented as much as they would by having a European actor play the same role.

* BlackVikings/{{Literature}}

[[folder:Literature]]
* Myth/{{Arthurian|Legend}} medieval literature has featured Saracen and Moorish (i.e. Middle Eastern and African) knights since about the 13th century.
** By far the most important example due to appearing in multiple derivative medieval works is Sir Palamedes (or Palomides), a Saracen frenemy of the Cornish Sir Tristan who joins him at the Round Table after competing for the Irish lady Isolde's hand. Palamedes's father Esclabor is sometimes said to be King of Babylon, and his brothers Safir (or Safere) and Segwarides also join the Round Table. Like all such non-antagonistic examples in Arthurian literature, they eventually convert to Christianity from "paganism".
** One-off characters in various works include Sir Morien (Moriaen), the half-Moorish son of Sir Aglovale, nephew of Sir Percivale and grandson of King Pellinore. Certainly he has a PunnyName, and he appears in a self-titled anonymous Dutch romance. Another half-Moorish knight is Percivale's half-brother Feirefiz, son of the Moorish queen Belacane and future father of the fabled Christian king in the East, Prester John, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's ''Literature/{{Parzival}}'', a work most scholars date to the 1310s. But here Percival and Feirefiz's father is named Gahmuret.
* In the medieval romance ''King Horn,'' Saracens invade Suddene (a mythical kingdom in the British Isles). This is probably a RaceLift as the villains act just like Viking conquerors, but by the time the story was written down Vikings had become passé and the Crusades were the new hot topic.
* In the same vein, in Sir Thomas Mallory's ''Literature/LeMorteDArthur'', an early war between the newly installed King Arthur and an alliance of rebel British petty kings and lords is defused after Saracens invade the latter's lands. In much earlier tellings such Geoffrey of Monmouth's ''Literature/HistoriaRegumBritanniae'', the invaders are Saxons not Saracens.
* The later Creator/SvenHassel novels introduced Stabsgefreiter Albert Mumbuto, a black soldier in the German army of UsefulNotes/WW2. However, the website [[http://www.svenhassel.info/ Porta's Kitchen]] mentioned a documentary where several black Germans were interviewed, including at least one soldier. Germany had had an African colonial empire until 1919 so there were a number of African-Germans long after that. This matter surfaces in Istvan Szabo's movie ''Mephisto'', taking place in the 1930s, in which the protagonist, a famous theatre director, has an African-German mistress and is therefore chastised by an angry Hermann Göring. Though it might surprise a modern reader, while [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 racism toward black Germans]] [[http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/?lang=en&content=blacks is well-documented]] and horrible, this wasn't as systematic as their persecution of the Jews.
* {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d and {{Justified|Trope}} in ''Literature/{{Everworld}}'':
** There are Vikings of all different races because Everworld's transplanted cultures have a vastly different geography from "the Old World" (our world), so that Everworld-Vikings regularly raid Everworld-Aztecs, Everworld-Africans, and apparently Everworld-Asians; this results in many new people entering the Viking society as slaves (who may gain freedom and work their way up) or from mixed marriages between Vikings and captured women. Their king, Olaf Ironfoot, is actually black.
** The Amazons are described as similarly having children with whatever men they happen to conquer. The queen, Pretty Little Flower, is mixed-race.
* A [[SassyBlackWoman black Moorish woman prosecuting attorney]] named [[{{Valkyries}} Brunhild]] (!) appears in the eponymous ''Die Morin'', written by [[UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire German]] poet Hermann von Sachsenheim in the year ''[[OlderThanTheyThink 1453]]''. She is supposed to prosecute love cases for the goddess Venus and her lover, King Theatre/{{Tannhaeuser}} (!!), who, according to legend, lived in a subterranean kingdom under some mountain in Germany. Probably Sachsenheim assumed that a servant of Venus was a pagan, and a pagan was a Muslim, and a Muslim was a Moor, and that "Brun-hild" meant "brown-maiden" (instead of "byrnie (=mail-coat)-warrior").
* A Creator/PeterDavid novel about King Arthur in modern times, ''Literature/KnightLife'', makes Percival, the Grail Knight, a Moor. Everyone is totally surprised by this in the novel and a scholar or two "refutes" it in front of him.
* Characters with red hair and blue or green eyes are fairly common in classic Chinese novels such as ''WaterMargin''. This may be justified given the ethnic makeup among the peoples of Central Asian regions bordering China during the Middle Ages, and mentions of giant men with red hair and light eyes on their far western borders, sometimes believed to have been, yes, Vikings (not entirely implausible, since the Viking trade routes down to the Black Sea went quite deep into modern Russia, and once the Kievan Rus' (founded by Vikings) was established in the 9th century, it started developing eastwards too.
* Ranec, from Jean M. Auel's ''[[Literature/EarthsChildren The Mammoth Hunters]]'', is a black Cro-Magnon living in Ancient Russia north of the Caspian Sea. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] by the fact that, in his youth, Ranec's father made a long journey to the region that is now Ethiopia, married a woman there, and returned to Russia with his son after his wife's death.
* Creator/MichaelChabon's ''Literature/GentlemenOfTheRoad'', which has protagonists that are a black Abyssinian and a very white Eastern Frank, both Jewish, who travel the world as bandits and mercenaries and end up in the Caucasus. The Khazars, a nation of Turkic Jews, also features heavily in the plot. It was Chabon's intention to explore the lesser-known branches of Jewish lineage.
* Sanya, one of the [[{{Paladin}} knights of the Cross]] in ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'', is a black Russian. He himself notes that his color would turn heads in Moscow and that he couldn't go to rural villages without causing traffic accidents.
* Black servants play a significant part in the series of ''[[{{Literature/Angelique}} Angélique]]'' novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of [[UsefulNotes/LouisXIV King Louis XIV]]. They existed in RealLife in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
* Children's novel ''Surviving the Applewhites'' has, as one of the subplots, a performance of ''The Sound of Music'' with color-blind casting. This leads to, among other things, an ad-libbed line that the von Trapp children are all adopted.
* The 16th-century Italian epic ''Literature/OrlandoFurioso'' has Ruggiero, an Arab, as one of Charlemagne's knights.
[[/folder]]

!!Examples:

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* Pictured above is ''Film/TheNorseman'', a 1978 film that features the late [[UsefulNotes/NFLDefensiveAndSpecialTeamsPlayers Deacon Jones]] as an African thrall (a.k.a. slave). Which, by itself, isn't really that egregious. Vikings would enslave some captives of any race as thralls, and sometimes freed thralls would become Vikings themselves. If there were any historical black Vikings, this is how it ''could've'' happened, albeit there is no existing evidence for them.
* ''Film/AKidInKingArthursCourt'' had black people fully integrated into a [[TheThemeParkVersion Theme Park Version]] of Myth/KingArthur's court with no explanation given whatsoever (though considering the King Arthur of popular culture is a myth, this can be excused).
* Moors in the Merry Men of ''Film/RobinHood'', something introduced with the character of Nasir in Creator/{{ITV}}'s ''Series/RobinOfSherwood'', and subsequently taken up in the film ''Film/RobinHoodPrinceOfThieves'' with [[Creator/MorganFreeman Azeem]], and the latest series from Creator/TheBBC (not to mention [[Creator/DaveChappelle Achoo]] in ''[[Film/RobinHoodMenInTights Men in Tights]]''). The BBC version takes this trend a step further, as there is at least one black character working for the Sheriff, and a black thief is taken seriously when she claims to be the leader of an order of nuns; unlike the Arabic characters, the black characters are portrayed as fully accepted members of medieval English society.
* The live-action version of ''Film/BeautyAndTheBeast2017'' has a number of black people at the Prince's party. While the black singer is possible, though unlikely, in 18th Century France, black courtiers (the dancers) are pretty unlikely - though not impossible, as was demonstrated by Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (father of Creator/AlexandreDumas), a mixed-race general during the French Revolutionary Wars towards the end of the 18th century.
* In the feature film adaption of ''Film/WildWildWest'', Creator/WillSmith, a black man, is cast as the protagonist, James West, a U.S. Army officer in 1869. The first post-war black U.S. Army officer, Henry O. Flipper, was commissioned on his graduation from West Point in 1877. This is perhaps excusable given that the film also features [[CattlePunk a giant mechanical tarantula]], so it's clearly operating on RuleOfCool rather than aiming for any sort of historical accuracy.
* Both averted and played straight in ''Film/BlackKnight2001''. When Creator/MartinLawrence travels to medieval England and becomes a FishOutOfTemporalWater, he is called a "Moor" in a disrespectful tone and runs into conflict a few times because of his skin color. Yet when he arrives at the castle there is a black chambermaid there and nobody seems to care. [[spoiler:It was all just a dream anyway]].
* In ''Film/MuchAdoAboutNothing1993'', the character Don Pedro is the Prince of Aragon and played by Creator/DenzelWashington. It might have been a stylish choice to make his illegitimate brother's deep hatred for him more obvious.
* Creator/KennethBranagh's version of ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'' has a few black people among the staff of the Danish castle, including one woman who was originally a "gentleman" in the play. The film updates the time period to somewhere in the 1800s, but that doesn't change much. Although it would have been slightly less likely in the 16th century since the Virgin Islands were a Danish colony until the Great War.
* ''Film/{{MASH}}'', set during the Korean War, featured a black surgeon. The [[Series/{{MASH}} TV show]] followed suit for a few episodes until the anachronism was pointed out to the producers. While ostensibly set in the 1950s, ''M*A*S*H'' was ultimately pretty much a mix of UsefulNotes/VietnamWar and (then-) PresentDayPast, anyway. Presumably, the producers never bothered to check any sources about the 8055th MASH, the real unit in Korea the movie was based on, which ''did'' have a black surgeon on staff (the U.S. Army wasn't fully integrated until 1954, one year after the Korean conflict ended, but piecemeal integration had occurred in the 1940s and even earlier).
* ''Film/ForceTenFromNavarone'' does its best to avert this trope and use it too. [[Creator/CarlWeathers Carl "Apollo Creed" Weathers]] unknowingly forces his way into the middle of a plane full of commandos flying to Yugoslavia to fight the Nazis. The frustrated commandos immediately point out how much Weathers will stick out in Yugoslavia, complete with a snide comment about a Zulu invasion. When they land, the leader of the native force they join up with is bemused by his appearance to the point of pretending to wipe the blackness off of Weathers' face.
* German actor Günther Kaufmann, whose father was an African-American GI, plays a Viking in ''Wickie und die starken Männer'' (''Wickie and the Strong Men'') -- a LiveActionAdaptation of ''Literature/VickyTheViking'', thus [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin making this a very literal example of this trope]]. With heavy makeup, [[AmbiguouslyBrown Kaufmann's actual ethnicity is hard to tell]] though.
* In a version of ''Theatre/JosephAndTheAmazingTechnicolorDreamcoat'' released on DVD, two of the brothers (Judah and Benjamin) are played by black actors. This is something of a continuity problem as the two were born to different mothers, according to Genesis. The other ten brothers are pretty much all over the apparent ethnicity map (the twelve had the same father, who had four wives). And Joseph's father Jacob did have concubines who may have been of different ethnicities than his two wives, who were sisters. Jacob having had black sons is not impossible. On the other hand, Benjamin is supposed to be the ''full'' brother of Joseph. In any case, that particular version is [[RuleOfFunny a comedy]].
* In the 1973 film version of ''Music/JesusChristSuperstar'', Judas is black. Some critics saw the casting as racist, but the filmmakers insisted that Carl Anderson was simply the best man for the role (Ben Vereen faced similar criticism for playing the role on Broadway, and Anderson was in fact his understudy). Jesus, meanwhile, is white, Mary Magdalene is Hawaiian, and the other disciples are all different races (but then again, the film makes no pretense at realism).
* In a flashback in ''Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen'', The Fallen is attacked by various native ancient Africans. Among these native Africans is a white man.
* Creator/EarthaKitt as Freya the Norn in ''Film/ErikTheViking''. The casting helps portray her as somewhat "other" from the rest of the tribe, and it helps that she's light-skinned to begin with.
* ''Film/ThreeHundred'' features quite a few high-ranking black members of the Persian Empire, implying that a significant population of the elites in Persia were black. The Persian Empire under Xerxes I only held a small portion of modern-day Egypt and so did not have any large population of Sub-Saharan Africans, particularly among its elites. Of course, their army is also portrayed as including monsters of various kinds, so it's not really realistic, and this is told by an UnreliableNarrator who may have exaggerated things. This is oddly enforced from a meta perspective as [[BrownFace some characters had their skin darkened in postproduction]], so for example the white actor Rodrigo Santoro (who is of Italo-Portuguese descent and could easily pass for Iranian) ends up looking like a ScaryBlackMan as Xerxes.
* There's a whole FriendlyLocalChinatown in ''Film/GangsOfNewYork'', and half the story is set in a Chinese cathouse, to which historians were quick to point out that the Chinese population of New York was virtually nonexistent at the time.
* Played for laughs in Creator/WoodyAllen's ''Film/LoveAndDeath'', with a shouting black drill sergeant in 1812 Russia.
* In ''Film/KingdomOfHeaven'', Creator/LiamNeeson's character Godfrey leads a small rainbow coalition of warriors back from the Crusades, one of whom is a black man. It's supposed to indicate how so many different cultures have been drawn to the fight over the Holy Land. It's not ''completely'' impossible since there were Orthodox Christians from Ethiopia and Nubia.
* ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheFirstAvenger'': The Howling Commandos includes a Japanese-American and two African-Americans fighting with white soldiers before the American military fully desegregated. It's understandable since the squad is a RagtagBunchOfMisfits formed from a group of [=POWs=] and handpicked by a superhero who couldn't care less about trivial things like races and nationalities, and even ''then'' Dum Dum Dugan does, albeit briefly, take little offense to letting Jim Morita come with them.
--> '''Dum Dum:''' What, are we taking ''everybody''?
--> '''Jim:''' I'm from Fresno, Ace!
* ''Film/CatherineCalledBirdy2022'': Rural 13th-century England is much more diverse than it would be in real life. For example, several supporting characters (such as Meg, Finneas, Ethelfritha, and Berenice) are played by Black British actors. A handful of the suitors are men of color as well, though some of them are mentioned to be in trade.
* Music/QueenLatifah as Mama Morton in the movie ''Film/{{Chicago}}''. A female African-American jail warden in charge of white prisoners in 1920s America? That wouldn't happen.
* In ''Film/ChristopherAndHisKind'', there is at least one black man in the gay club Isherwood frequents. Given that this happened in early 1930s Berlin, it is a little jarring, though possible.
* Creator/KennethBranagh's version of ''Theatre/AsYouLikeIt'' has a lot of white, black, and Japanese actors. You may be noticing he tends to do this a lot.
* In the 2004 musical TV special of ''Literature/AChristmasCarol'', the Ghost of Christmas Present is played by Afro-American actor Jesse L. Martin (though the character is an abstract spirit in Scrooge's dream, which is less jarring than if he was an ordinary guy in VictorianLondon). Ditto for theater productions using colourblind casting.
* Parodied in ''The Hooligan Factory'' with Midnight, stated to be "the original black hooligan. Actually, I think back in the day he was the only black hooligan."
* ''Film/{{Dogma}}'' plays the trope for laughs by introducing a thirteenth apostle of Jesus, who was left out of the Bible because he's black.
* ''Film/{{Centurion}} '' features Creator/NoelClarke, an English actor with Afro-Caribbean heritage playing "Macro", a refugee from Numidia and a legionary from the second cohort of the Ninth Legion. Schoolboy error here, Numidia in modern-day Tunisia was populated by light/olive-skinned Berbers and descendants of the Semitic Carthaginians. The writer probably meant Nubia, the country in modern-day Sudan and Egypt. The same Roman unit also features Creator/RizAhmed playing Tarak, the company cook, who "hails from the Hindu Kush", which neatly matches Ahmed's own Pakistani ancestry. The latter is a subversion since the Hindu Kush had contact with the Parthian Empire which fought the Romans twice, so it isn't entirely implausible for a local to end up in a Roman legion without stretching too much the limits of disbelief.
* ''Film/KingArthurLegendOfTheSword'': The film [[AnachronismStew doesn't even attempt]] to be historically accurate, so there are a few non-European characters around, including Bedivere, who is given a RaceLift and played by Creator/DjimonHounsou, Wetstick, who appears to be mixed race, and a character called Kung Fu George, who is Asian. While non-white people did wind up in medieval England after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it's highly unlikely that ancient London was nearly this cosmopolitan.
* ''Film/TheScorpionKing'': The racial makeup of the cast is, shall we say, a bit odd for AncientEgypt, what with the half-Samoan Creator/DwayneJohnson playing an Akkadian (of course, the film's Akkadians seem to have virtually nothing in common with the actual Akkadians) and Creator/KellyHu (a mix of English, Chinese, and Native Hawaiian) playing a character with the Greek name of Cassandra.
* ''{{Film/Ophelia}}'': The film is set in Denmark in the Middle Ages, yet a few of the courtiers are played by actors of color. Most notably, Horatio is portrayed by Devon Terrell, who has mixed ethnicity (his father is African-American and his mother is Anglo-Indian). Then again, most modern performances/adaptations of Shakespeare plays tend to have {{colorblind casting}}, so that may be the intention here.
* ''Film/PaganWarrior'' is set in England in 812, and has a black Saxon woman and a Mediterranean-looking Saxon queen. No explanation is offered for this in-story. Given the film's obviously tiny budget, the most likely reason is that the actors were known to the creators, and were willing to make up the numbers.
* Creator/DudleyMoore's comedy film ''Film/WhollyMoses'' presents Egyptians as Sub-Saharan Africans (the Pharaoh is the great Creator/RichardPryor), a controversial topic on its own, especially back then, however as is a comedy this might be intentional.
* Inverted in ''Film/MulanRiseOfAWarrior'', where the king of the Rouran Khaganate has a white court musician (played by Russian-Latvian singer Music/{{Vitas}}). It's not ''too'' implausible given that Northern Asia and Eastern Europe are side by side and Chinese historical accounts referenced giants with red hair and green or blue eyes. Furthermore, parts of Western China (modern UsefulNotes/{{Xinjiang}}) were inhhabited by Tocharians, a Nordic-looking and Indo-European speaking people.
* ''Film/ThePersonalHistoryOfDavidCopperfield'' uses deliberately colour-blind casting, allowing characters who were implicitly white to be played by actors of a variety of different backgrounds regardless of their role. The protagonist is played by Creator/DevPatel, the Wickfield father-daughter duo are played by Creator/BenedictWong and a black woman, and Ham is played by a black man.
* ''Film/WithAKissIDie'': Juliet, a medieval Italian noblewoman, is black here. While not impossible, it would have been unlikely for a noble Veronese family like Capulets to be of African descent. This isn't commented on in the film.
* ''Film/TheGreenKnight'': Camelot is filled with people of Asian and African descent, probably to justify the {{Race Lift}}s of various Arthurian characters, most notably Gawain himself, played by Creator/DevPatel.
* ''Film/TheNameOfTheRose'': Brother Venantius, the Greek scholar and translator, is played by half-Nigerian Swiss actor Urs Althaus and called "the black monk" by main character William of Baskerville at one point. However it is never questioned, nor is any explanation given to why a black man ended in such position at a remote Alpine monastery in the 14th century.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* ''Series/DoctorWho'':
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E4TheGirlInTheFireplace The Girl in the Fireplace]]" has a black noblewoman in the Court of Louis XVI. Some fans have [[FanWank attempted to explain]] this by pointing out the existence of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_de_Saint-Georges Chevalier de Saint-Georges]], a real eighteenth-century composer and musician known as "the black Mozart", who did in fact perform at Versailles, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (father of Creator/AlexandreDumas) who was Saint-Georges' student and later a general during the French Revolutionary Wars. It's especially jarring considering there is an Orientalist portrait of Madame de Pompadour dressed like a Turkish sultana and being served by a black slave girl -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C._van_Loo_Sultane.jpg an exotic possession, for crying out loud.]] Angel Coulby, the actress who played the black noblewoman, also played Gwen in ''Series/Merlin2008''.
** Averted with Martha's presence in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E2TheShakespeareCode The Shakespeare Code]]": Martha initially worries that being black in 1600s London will cause trouble, but the Doctor laughs it off, assuring her that London has all types of people. In this case, he's right. Elizabethan London had [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_of_black_immigrants_in_London a significant African population]] -- large enough that Elizabeth complained about it on multiple occasions. It was also about half a century before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and thus, racialized slavery, really took off.
** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E8HumanNature Human Nature]]", set in England just before World War I, averts this trope, as one of the students starts saying offensive things to Martha, and John Smith seems to find it utterly believable that Martha might not understand the concept of fiction. Smith's love interest understandably is rather incredulous when Martha claims to be a doctor, remarking that a ''woman'' doctor was conceivable but not "one of your colour" as said to Martha's face.
** The titular character of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E14TheNextDoctor The Next Doctor]]" has a black female companion, Rosita, in 1851. She gets treated like anyone else in the story except for two brief, almost missable moments. The first is when the [[spoiler:villainess asks whether the Doctor "paid [her] to speak," which could be either a servitude reference or merely an implied suggestion that she thinks Rosita is a prostitute. The second is at the end when they live happily ever after and Jackson Lake makes a comment about her being his son's nursemaid]].
** Isabella and her father from "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E6TheVampiresOfVenice The Vampires of Venice]]" are an exception. As a nexus of trade all across the Mediterranean, Venice would have been home to all sorts. (But she also has modern-day straightened hair.)
** UsefulNotes/RichardNixon has ''two'' black agents in his security detail in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E1TheImpossibleAstronaut The Impossible Astronaut]]". (In reality, Nixon did have at least one.)
** The series 9 opener "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E1TheMagiciansApprentice The Magician's Apprentice]]" features some black extras in Essex in 1138, leading to some debate as to whether this is realistic or not.
** Justified in the Series 10 episode "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS36E3ThinIce Thin Ice]]", set in London in the early 19th century (the Regency Era) when Bill notes that London seems "a bit more black" than the movies suggest. The Doctor replies that "history is a whitewash", while also indicating that Jesus was black, too.
* This is all over ''Series/MortalKombatConquest''. While the series is set in ancient China, Kung Lao is the only one of the protagonists who is actually Asian. The rest of the cast is suspiciously multicultural. The only justified one is Raiden, who as a god could conceivably take any form he wished. But then why is he a white guy?
* An early episode of ''Series/RobinHood'' has [[TheDragon Guy of Gisbourne's]] political scheming against the [[BigBad Sheriff's]] current Master at Arms. The fact that the Master at Arms is black in 12th-century England is never mentioned nor influence the plot. [[WordOfGod The producers have mentioned]] that originally there was no intention for the character to be black, but that the actor gave such a damned fine audition and performance that they felt he could pull it off regardless of the fact that that he would seem out of place, and gave him the part as-written, without any changes to make reference to his color. In Season 3, Friar Tuck is black.
* The start of Season 2 of ''Series/SirArthurConanDoylesTheLostWorld'' has an episode where several modern people are transported to the plateau. Even though the main characters are from the start of the 20th century, they don't seem to notice that the helicopter pilot is black and treat him like anyone else.
* NBC's ''Literature/GulliversTravels'' miniseries: In contrast to the lily-white Lilliputians, Brobdingnag is home to many black giants (including Alfre Woodard as the Queen) looking a little out-of-place in 18th century powdered wigs. This is actually consistent with the Utopian nature of the island and probably a way of playing up its superiority to both Lilliput and Gulliver's England.
* ''Series/TheSuiteLifeOfZackAndCody'' had Brenda Song playing an ancestor of London Tipton... during the American Revolutionary War. Hilariously but subtly lampshaded in that she seems to be (or believe that she is) French. Whether it was intentional and she really was supposed to be London's French paternal ancestor, it was intentional and she was absurdly somewhere in London's Thai ancestry, or it was completely unintended, it was completely {{Handwaved}} by being AllJustADream had by [[BookDumb Zack]]. Also, Mr. Moseby, who is black, is seen as a rich man. Most blacks in the Revolutionary War were slaves, but it is possible he was a free man.
* In ''Series/TheMysticKnightsOfTirNaNog'', set in pre-Christian Ireland, one of the heroes is black -- but it's justified by having him come from {{Atlantis}}, which, being mythical, can have any ethnic mix it wants.
* Like ''The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog'', the short-lived ''{{Series/Roar}}'', which starred Heath Ledger, is also set in pre-Christian Ireland and still features a black character named Tully amongst Ledger's band of Celtic chieftains. Unlike in ''Mystic Knights'', there's no justification given.
* Both ''Series/HerculesTheLegendaryJourneys'' and ''Series/XenaWarriorPrincess'' had black Greeks. Knowing the extent of the Mediterranean trade in the Antiquity, there was a slight possibility for Ethiopian, Nubian, or darker-skinned Egyptian people to settle in Greek lands, even more so in port cities, as traders, sailors, mercenaries or former slaves. However, their numbers could not be great. Given that both shows are filmed in New Zealand, whenever they needed "ethnic" mooks (for example, to represent Egyptians), they would usually cast Maori or other Pacific Islanders and hope that audiences perceived them as just being AmbiguouslyBrown.
* Suggested but not confirmed in ''Series/PowerRangersSamurai'', as out of five descendants of Japanese samurai, only one is Asian. It's either this trope or the equally unlikely scenario that the families mingled with other races in just the right way to make a FiveTokenBand. Don't bother thinking about it too hard as history has never been the franchise's strong suit.
* In the ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'' episode "[[Recap/MysteryScienceTheater3000S05E01WarriorOfTheLostWorld Warrior of the Lost World]]", the guys remark on how the [[GangOfHats gangs of hats]] include black Nazis and white ninjas.
* A sketch on the CBBC show ''Series/HorribleHistories'' about Vikings actually featured a Black Viking as an extra.
* In another History Channel example, ''Series/BarbariansRising'', Hannibal and the rest of the Carthaginian people are played by black actors. In real life, Carthage's elite was formed by people of Phoenician ethnicity, a Semitic group closely related to Middle Eastern groups such as Jews and Arabs, while most of its African vassals were Berbers - none of whom are black.
* In ''Series/TheMusketeers'', Porthos is black. According to WordOfGod, this is a tribute to Creator/AlexandreDumas's actual black ancestry (his paternal grandmother was a black slave in Haiti). It isn't a case of colour-blind casting, as in several episodes his racial background is an explicit driver of the plot. [[spoiler:It finally turns out that, like Dumas's father, he was the product of a nobleman's affair with a black servant woman, and he was brought into the Musketeers by a friend of his father who felt guilty about helping his father to discard his black mistress.]]
* The trope is discussed in an episode of ''Series/{{Psych}}''. When the creators of a play defend their [[MonochromeCasting all-white cast]] on the grounds that the show takes place in 1880s London, Gus gets annoyed and asks if they think black people hadn't been invented yet.
* ''Series/BlackSails'' includes Joji, a [[KatanasAreJustBetter katana]]-toting Japanese member of a Caribbean pirate crew in 1715. While it's possible that a single Japanese sailor might somehow get himself onto a Caribbean pirate ship, the show takes place during a period of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku extreme seclusion]] in Japan, where the Japanese government actively prohibited its people from leaving. His presence is obviously fuelled by RuleOfCool. That said, there were Japanese Catholic communities that did settle in Mexico in the 17th century, so it is plausible for Joji to be descended from them.
* ''{{Series/Camelot}}'': Vivian, Morgan's servant, is black. However, Vivian tells Morgan her ancestors were brought over as slaves from Africa by the Romans, which is actually possible, as some British archaeological findings show that people of African descent (both free and slave) [[TruthInTelevision really did come from Roman Africa to Roman Britain]]. This could also explain Sir Ulfius, Arthur's black knight.
* ''Series/Merlin2008'': Guinevere, her father, her brother, and Sir Pellinore are all black. However, they also have dragons and fey, and Albion is portrayed less as a past historical England than as a standard fantasy land. It's also not so much of a stretch as people think, as there is evidence of some black people in medieval England. Of course, none were knights or queens that we know of.
* ''Series/TroyFallOfACity'': Many of the Trojan and Greek characters are portrayed by black actors, which wasn't true in reality of these ethnicities. Of course, it's fictional to begin with. In fairness, Greeks and Trojans likely also looked different from the actors portraying them, who are mostly of British or Irish stock. Also other stories of the Trojan War really did have black characters, most notably the Ethiopian Memnon, a king on Troy's side who comes to fight the Greeks along with his army... but he's not included here.
* ''Series/LegendsOfTomorrow'' runs into this occasionally being a series about a team of people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds traveling into the (usually American) past. In "Night of the Hawk" Ray Palmer (white) and Hawkgirl (ethnicity in-universe unspecified although she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian; the actress has African-American and Native American ancestry) pose as a married couple in Oregon in the 1950s. Oregon did repeal its anti-miscegenation law in 1951 but mixed-race couples still drew negative attention and restrictive housing covenants prevented such couples from living in many neighborhoods. In the same episode, Martin Stein waxes nostalgic about the idyllic 1950s, only for the African-American Jax and the bisexual Sara to remind him things weren't so great in the 1950s if you weren't straight, white and male. As a Jew, Stein should have known that religious minorities didn't have it so great either. In "Abominations" Stein expresses guilt about Jax having to endure Civil War-era racism. Jax points out that pretty much every era of American history is racist. When the team travels to historical eras where the presence of non-white people would be remarkable, no one native to the time remarks on it.
* ''Series/TheSpanishPrincess'': The show gives Catherine of Aragon a black woman as her most senior lady-in-waiting and best friend, [[CompositeCharacter mixing or confusing]] her historical lady-in-waiting Catalina de Cardones and a slave [[PlanetOfSteves named Catalina de Motril]] that was part of her entourage (and married a Morisco named Oviedo, basis of the other TokenBlack character in the series). The other lady-in-waiting is a fully fictional Romani.
* ''Series/MiracleWorkers'': Though ostensibly set in DarkAgeEurope, black or South Asian characters exist along with the white ones without an explanation. Al's father is white, though her (unseen) mother might also be South Asian. Of course, it's no less (or more) accurate than the rest.
* Creator/DavidOyelowo plays Inspector Javert in the ''Series/{{Masterpiece}}'' MiniSeries production of ''Literature/LesMiserables''. It's not likely that a black man could have risen to such a position in 19th century France.
* ''Series/{{Rome}}'' presents Cleopatra's escort as played mostly by black actors. Probably because unlike Cleopatra herself (who was Greek) the rest were supposed to be native Egyptians. However though this is a complex and contentious matter (the exact race of the Egyptians) most historians consider they were mostly not Black in the modern sense of the word.[[note]]Not including the Nubians who, indeed, ruled Egypt for a while and are still an ethnic minority there.[[/note]]
* ''Series/{{Dickinson}}'': A couple of East Asian people are shown in Amherst during the 1850s, when very few even lived in the US.
* ''Series/{{Vikings}}'': Although the series generally averts this, there are two notable exception:
** During the raid of Algericas, in UsefulNotes/MoorishSpain (Al-Andalus), the population is a mixture of Arab-Berbers and black people. Although the ethnic situation of Al-Andalus is still hotly debated among scholars, it's generally believed to have been a mixture of Arab-Berbers and native Spaniards, either Christians (so called ''Mozarabs'') or Muslim converts. What is shown in the series is unlikely to have been the ethnic composition of any town in Al-Andalus.
** The sixth series introduces the UsefulNotes/KievanRus, and the captain of Oleg's personal forces is a vaguely Turkic dude with a Mongolian name, Ganbaatar. While the presence of Turkic mercenaries among the Rus wouldn't be absurd (given that they bordered with Khazars, Pechenegs and Cumans), the Mongolian name pretty much is, since Batu Khan's invasion only took place 400 years later. Until then, Mongols were confined to their homeland in Northeast Asia, and even Central Asia was mostly a Turkic block with no relevant Mongol presence. It doesn't help that the series employs generous ArtisticLicenseHistory and portrays the Rus as absolutely ahistorical HordesFromTheEast, when they were actually similar to the Norse.
* ''Series/VikingsValhalla'': Jarl Haakon and Altöra play this trope straight and are portrayed by actresses of African descent. No such figures appear in the sagas or historical records. The closest parallel are the brothers Hámund and Geirmund Heljarskin, two princes who were of part White Sea descent and had features that likely resembled the Uralic Samoyeds.
* Happens very frequently in adaptations of fantasy novels that were made around 2020:
** ''Series/{{The Witcher|2019}}'' takes place on a fantastic AlternateUniverse Earth whose human peoples were displaced there from our own by the Conjunction of the Spheres. RaceLift is enacted many, many times, seemingly at random, when in the source material nearly every character looked Northern European, resulting in rustic pseudo Polish villages being half populated by black or Asian people. Given how humanity arrived on the planet originally, it'd actually be semi-justified for the populations to not correspond to geography, but what makes it count for this trope is how this is done: all of the populations are inexplicably mixed. Every single village, town, and city in every single country has demographics roughly in line with a modern American or British city. Despite the Conjunction of the Spheres having taken place over a thousand years prior, every country not only maintains visible racial minorities who are not acknowledged as such, but they all seem to have the exact same mix as every other country - including the native dwarves and elves. ''Series/TheWitcherBloodOrigin'' takes it even further.
** The same can be said about ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'', including the inexplicably diverse small communities that would in any real setting have become a lot more homogenous due to intermarriage taking place.
** While the source material for ''Series/TheWheelOfTime2021'' visits places that are generally a lot more multi-ethnic than most other classic fantasy novels, the population of the remote village Emondsfield is, again, as diverse as a modern Western urban area.
** ''Series/HouseOfTheDragon'' has subjected the Velaryon family (who, as pure-blooded Valyrians, basically look the same as the Tagaryens in the source material) to a RaceLift, making them black, although still of Valyrian descent and sharing the white hair of their Targaryen cousins. Unlike aforementioned adaptations, however, this departure from the books is generally restricted to them; and the effects of intermarrying become an even more obvious plot point in the show than in the books (with the pallid skin tone of Rhaenyra Targaryen's first three children making it even clearer that they weren't fathered by her husband Laenor Velaryon as claimed).
* ''Series/KnightSquad'' takes place in the fictional kingdom of Astoria, which is supposed to resemble medieval Europe. Ciara, [[spoiler:the princess of Astoria]] and Warwick are black, and Sage is [[AmbiguouslyBrown implied to be Latina]], neither of which were common in medieval Europe. [[note]]The Kingdom of Astoria's exact location was never mentioned, so the series may have not actually taken place in medieval Europe.[[/note]]
* Children's BBC Series ''Series/MaidMarianAndHerMerryMen'' parodies the tendency for ''Robin Hood'' adaptations to include a Moorish character as one of Robin Hood's allies, with Barrington, a black ''Rastafarian'' Merry Man.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]
* The Nazi GGG {{Ghostapo}} organization in ''VideoGame/BloodRayne'' has an Asian woman as one of its leaders. Vaguely semi-justified in that she's Tibetan, and the Nazi racial science considered Tibetans to be an Aryan race. Oh, and she's also half-vampire, which the GGG seems to consider a plus.
* ''VideoGame/DragaliaLost'' has Addis, a black samurai as a retainer for Ieyasu of the Boar Clan, one of the Twelve Wyrmclans of Hinomoto (The game version of [[FantasyCounterpartCulture Japan]]). In this case, he's based on Yasuke.
* ''VideoGame/MetalGear'':
** Averted and lampshaded in ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'': [[TheMole Naomi]], while discussing her background, mentions that her Japanese-American grandfather was an FBI agent under Hoover. Master Miller later tells Snake that was one of several inconsistencies in said background that made him realize she was lying: J. Edgar Hoover was a notorious racist and he never would've allowed a man of Japanese descent as an agent.
** In ''VideoGame/{{Metal Gear Solid 3|SnakeEater}}'', a African-American man named Donald Anderson, codenamed 'Sigint', was recruited by Zero in 1960s America for his skill and not because of his skin color. Notable in that Sigint was recruited during the final year of Jim Crow Laws, which barred black people from using the same facilities as whites in America. This is addressed by Sigint in an optional conversation, where he expresses his admiration for Zero as a committed non-racist who'll hire anyone good enough and bend the rules to keep them there. He discusses the racism present during that time and comments that racism will be present even in the twenty-first century. (Sigint's character was likely inspired by the African-American [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) "computers"]] who worked on Space Race projects in the 1950s and 60s - but in real history, these computers were usually black ''women'', computing usually being seen as a feminine/secretarial job.)
* The shrine at Kiersau Abbey in VideoGame/{{Pentiment}} depicts St. Moritz as a black knight and characters state he was an Egyptian serving in the Roman Legion. [[ShownTheirWork This is accurate to late Medieval and Renaissance depictions of him.]]
* Subverted in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil0'' where the Umbrella Training Facility which operated in the late 1960s, explicitly states their goal is to find the best candidates regardless of gender, race, or creed. In spite of this, every high-ranking member of the international company is clearly a white man or woman (though Morpheus Duvall is hinted he may have had gender-reassignment surgery).
* Enforced in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil5'': there are an awful lot of white people in Africa because people complained about UnfortunateImplications with all the Majini being black. Then again, there are an awful lot of white people in Africa if you know where to look. The Majini become less diverse once the action leaves the town of Kijuju, because from there the human enemies you meet either belonged to the native Ndipaya tribe or to a RUF-like mercenary outfit before they were infected.
* An interesting example in the ''[[VideoGame/SoulSeries Soulcalibur]]'' games with Zasalamel. Zasalamel is black, and while his country of origin is never directly stated, it's implied that he's supposed to be Sumerian, as many of his moves have names that reference the Sumerian gods. Granted, since he's [[ResurrectiveImmortality an immortal who reincarnates every time he's killed]], it's entirely possible that the body he appears with is not his original. That said, his ending in ''IV'', where he is in the modern era, several hundred years after the game's events, shows Zasalamel still in the same body. While the implication is that he merely comes back to life each time he dies, and doesn't body hop when he reincarnates, it's unclear if Zasalamel was truly able to break his [[WhoWantsToLiveForever "curse of immortality"]], his goal in ''III''. (All that's stated in ''IV'' is that the power of the soul swords gave him a vision of the future later seen in his ending.) It wouldn't be many years later, in ''VideoGame/SoulcaliburVI'', that Zasalamel would definitely state that he's reincarnated as people of various ethnicities ([[GenderBender and genders]]) over the course of his long life.
* In ''VideoGame/CrusaderKings II'', it's possible (though updates have made it more difficult) to turn your dynasty into the most literal version of this trope. Some figurative versions are significantly easier.
** One event for the northern Italian merchant republics guarantees one of your sons will end up falling in love with, and possibly marrying, a West African woman, making the possibility of a doge two or three elections down the line being of clearly African descent non-negligible.
** Court Physicians are frequently wanderers from faraway lands -- it's not uncommon to find, say, a Pecheneg in Spain because of this. Said physicians are guaranteed to be Christian, however, and with their extremely high education in matters medical and theological, they can rise very high in the church, even becoming Pope fairly often.
** The A.I. has a bad habit of letting skilled foreigners educate their children after giving them the heritage focus. Resulting in things like, say say, the Andalusian (but still Christian) Sultan of France. And any minor courtiers said Sultan generates will be ethnically as well as culturally Andalusian.
* ''VideoGame/SakuraWars: [[VideoGame/SakuraWarsSoLongMyLove So Long, My Love]]'' features Sagitta Weinberg/[[DubNameChange Cheiron Archer]], an African-American female lawyer in TheRoaringTwenties; while college-educated black professionals were far from unheard of since the early 1900s, what's odd is that this character never has to fight prejudice or racism in the series (which instead would have been likely). Even for an AlternateHistory, this is just stretching it a bit.
* Subverted in ''VideoGame/{{Nioh}}'', which has the "Obsidian Samurai", an African samurai during Japan's Warring States Period which caused many to accuse the game of this trope. In truth, UsefulNotes/OdaNobunaga really did have [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasuke an African man as one of his samurai,]] who had originally come to Japan enslaved as part of a missionary trip.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Imperivm}}'' franchise follows the already common trend of portraying almost everybody in Carthage as black people, most egregiously the Numidians.
* A funny example is ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'', which favors CosmeticallyDifferentSides: a pikeman from one nation looks identical to a pikeman from another, bar maybe a few color-coded bits. Furthermore, the majority of units look roughly Caucasian. On the other hand, unique units tend to look in line with their country's ethnicity. This can lead to the surrealness of, say, playing as Zulu, building a white spearman, upgrading them into a black Impi, and then upgrading them again into a white rifleman. However, this is first fixed in ''Civilization IV'''s expansions, which introduce multiple graphical sets for generic units.
* ''Franchise/AssassinsCreed'':
** ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedOrigins'' has The Duelist, [[spoiler:a Chinese gladiatrix in the Roman province of Cyrene and one of Bayek's opponents in the arena. While there was some contact between Ancient Rome and China, this happened long after the time span of the game's events]].
** Similar to the ''Origins'' example above, ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedValhalla'' has a character named Yanli, a Chinese merchant from the Tang dynasty who ended in Europe and met an English stablemaster named Rowan. Not only was there no European contact with China in the 9th century with the exception of the Byzantine Empire, but it's extremely unlikely for any Chinese person to end up in England given the vast geography needed to cross between continents and lack of knowledge at the time. The "River Raids" expansion adds Vagn, who plays this trope straight, though he doesn't join Eivor on their pillaging due to years of fighting had worn him down.
* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'' toys with this in the concept of "Pseudo-Servants": Heroic Spirits whose actual selves cannot become Servants, frequently but not always Divine Spirits, will instead appear in the likeness of an otherwise un-heroic mortal who has indirectly contacted the Holy Grail. This is the lore reason why Chinese tactician Zhuge Liang appears as a stuffy British professor (or [[Literature/FateZero a stuffy British teenager]]), why Sumerian goddess Ishtar appears as [[VisualNovel/FateStayNight a Japanese teenage girl]], etc.
[[/folder]]

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Gargoyles}}'' features one, not in its many historical flashbacks, but in modern day New York -- a recurring antagonist there is Mafia don Tony Dracon. While his organization consists almost entirely of {{Mooks}} who don't diverge in the slighest from a stereotypical template of a suit-wearing, slick-haired Italian-American, the role of TheConsigliere is held by a slightly less sharp-dressed black man known only as "Glasses", even though the Mafia is usually very selective about the ethnicity of its membership and the consigliere is almost always a full-blooded Sicilian. WordOfGod vaguely implies there's some sort of personal history between Dracon and Glasses which allowed the pair of them to circumvent the Mafia's usual restrictions.

* Creator/EarthaKitt as Freya the Norn in ''Film/ErikTheViking''. The casting helps portray her as somewhat "other" from the rest of the tribe, and it helps that she's [[ButNotTooBlack Not Too Black]] to begin with.

** ''Series/TheWitcher2019'' takes place on a fantastic AlternateUniverse Earth whose human peoples were displaced there from our own by the Conjunction of the Spheres. RaceLift is enacted many, many times, seemingly at random, when in the source material nearly every character looked Northern European, resulting in rustic pseudo Polish villages being half populated by black or Asian people. Given how humanity arrived on the planet originally, it'd actually be semi-justified for the populations to not correspond to geography, but what makes it count for this trope is how this is done: all of the populations are inexplicably mixed. Every single village, town, and city in every single country has demographics roughly in line with a modern American or British city. Despite the Conjunction of the Spheres having taken place over a thousand years prior, every country not only maintains visible racial minorities who are not acknowledged as such, but they all seem to have the exact same mix as every other country - including the native dwarves and elves.

* German actor Günther Kaufmann, whose father was an African-American GI, plays a Viking in ''Wickie und die starken Männer'' (''Wickie and the Strong Men'') -- a LiveActionAdaptation of ''Literature/VickyTheViking'', thus [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin making this a very literal example of this trope]]. With heavy Viking makeup [[AmbiguouslyBrown Kaufmann's actual ethnicity is hard to tell]] though.

* The UpdatedReRelease of ''Music/JeffWaynesMusicalVersionOfTheWarOfTheWorlds'' gives Parson Nathaniel what sounds like a Jamaican accent. Not by any means ''impossible'' for Victorian England, but the odds of a (presumably) black man becoming a parish priest in a place and time where he'd attract rude stares for merely walking down the high street are not terribly high.[[note]] Both subverted and reinforced in RealLife by the experiences of George Edalji, a Christian of Indian Parsi descent who became a respected country parson in late Victorian times - until he was accused of a spate of animal slashings and went to prison for it. Forensic evidence eventually cleared him, but his reputation was shot, and ended up being a chaplain to a charity and never served as a frontline priest again. [[/note]]

* The UpdatedReRelease of ''Music/JeffWaynesMusicalVersionOfTheWarOfTheWorlds'' gives Parson Nathaniel what sounds like a Jamaican accent. Not by any means ''impossible'' for Victorian England, but the odds of a (presumably) black man becoming a parish priest in a place and time where he'd attract rude stares for merely walking down the high street are not terribly high.

** While the source material for ''Series/TheWheelOfTime'' series visits places that are generally a lot more multi-ethnic than most other classic fantasy novels, the population of the remote village Emondsfield is, again, as diverse as a modern Western urban area.

* Lampshaded in ''LightNovel/FullMetalPanic'' when Sousuke explains to Nami that he learned to pilot Arm Slaves in the [[UsefulNotes/SovietInvasionOfAfghanistan mujahideen]] when he was a preteen. Nami buys [[ImprobableAge the age]] much more readily than the faction.

* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'' toys with this in the concept of "Pseudo-Servants": Heroic Spirits whose actual selves cannot become Servants, frequently but not always Divine Spirits, will instead appear in the likeness of an otherwise un-heroic mortal who has indirectly contacted the Holy Grail. This is the lore reason why Chinese tactician Zhuge Liang appears as a stuffy British professor (or [[LightNovel/FateZero a stuffy British teenager]]), why Sumerian goddess Ishtar appears as [[VisualNovel/FateStayNight a Japanese teenage girl]], etc.

* Moors in the Merry Men of ''Film/RobinHood'', something introduced with the character of Nasir in Creator/{{ITV}}'s ''Series/RobinOfSherwood'', and subsequently taken up in the film ''Film/RobinHoodPrinceOfThieves'' with [[Creator/MorganFreeman Azeem]], and the latest series from Creator/TheBBC (not to mention [[Creator/DaveChappelle Achoo]] in ''[[Film/RobinHoodMenInTights Men in Tights]]''). The BBC version takes this trend a step further, as there is at least one black character working for the Sheriff, and a black thief is taken seriously when she claims to be the leader of an order of nuns; unlike the Arabic characters, the black characters are portrayed as fully accepted members of medieval English society. Children's BBC Series ''Series/Maid MariaAndHerMerryMen'' parodies this trope with Barrington, a black ''Rastafarian'' Merry Man.

* Moors in the Merry Men of ''Film/RobinHood'', something introduced with the character of Nasir in Creator/{{ITV}}'s ''Series/RobinOfSherwood'', and subsequently taken up in the film ''Film/RobinHoodPrinceOfThieves'' with [[Creator/MorganFreeman Azeem]], and the latest series from Creator/TheBBC (not to mention [[Creator/DaveChappelle Achoo]] in ''[[Film/RobinHoodMenInTights Men in Tights]]''). The BBC version takes this trend a step further, as there is at least one black character working for the Sheriff, and a black thief is taken seriously when she claims to be the leader of an order of nuns; unlike the Arabic characters, the black characters are portrayed as fully accepted members of medieval English society.

* ''Film/TheNameOfTheRose: Brother Venantius, the Greek scholar and translator, is played by half-Nigerian Swiss actor Urs Althaus and called "the black monk" by main character William of Baskerville at one point. However it is never questioned, nor is any explanation given to why a black man ended in such position at a remote Alpine monastery in the 14th century.

* ''Series/TheSpanishPrincess'': The show gives Catherine of Aragon a black woman as her most senior lady-in-waiting and best friend, [[CompositeCharacter mixing or confusing]] her historical lady-in-waiting Catalina de Motril and a slave [[PlanetOfSteves also named Catalina]] that was part of her entourage (and married a Morisco named Oviedo, basis of the other TokenBlack character in the series). The other lady-in-waiting is a fully fictional Romani.

** Carl is also originally from Iceland, and an episode centers around his Icelandic family. His parents are both white, and though this is never explicitly mentioned, we have to presume he was adopted. The episode "Carl Carlson Rides Again" confirms that he was, indeed, adopted, and his birth parents were African-American (with his dad being a famous bull-riding cowboy).

* ''Series/TheSpanishPrincess'': The show gives Catherine of Aragon a black woman as her most senior lady-in-waiting and best friend, mixing or confusing her historical lady-in-waiting Catalina de Motril and a slave also named Catalina that was part of her entourage (and married a Morisco named Oviedo, basis of the other TokenBlack character in the series). The other lady-in-waiting is a fully fictional Romani.

* ''Series/TheSpanishPrincess'': The show gives Catherine of Aragon a black woman as her most senior lady-in-waiting and best friend, mixing or confusing her historical lady-in-waiting Catalina de Motril and a slave also named Catalina that was part of her entourage (and married a Morisco named Oviedo, basis of the other TokenBlack character in the series).

* In ''Film/MuchAdoAboutNothing1993'', the character Don Pedro is the Prince of Aragon and played by Creator/DenzelWashington. While Spain was occupied for several centuries by the Moors, the Spaniards were nearly obsessed with ''limpieza de sangre'' or "purity of blood", and the aristocratic class was the worst. Furthermore, Moors were usually Arabs or Berbers whose skin tone ranges from light to brown. It might have been a stylish choice to make his illegitimate brother's deep hatred for him more obvious. Otherwise, this would have to get across by Creator/KeanuReeves's acting ability.

* ''Series/TheSpanishPrincess'': The show here has Catherine of Aragon with a black lady-in-waiting. Although the real Catherine did have a Moorish female slave named Catalina de Motril, Moors were Arabs or Berbers, not blacks. It's also very unlikely, given the rise of the ideology of ''limpieza de sangre'' (purity of blood - essentially, being able to prove your ancestry was totally Christian) they would ever have allowed her a guardsman who wasn't ethnically Spanish such as Oviedo (who's also black).

** Carl is also originally from Iceland, and an episode centers around his Icelandic family. His parents are both white, and though this is never explicitly mentioned, we have to presume he was adopted from some other country.

** "The Girl in the Fireplace" has a black noblewoman in the Court of Louis XVI. Some fans have [[FanWank attempted to explain]] this by pointing out the existence of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_de_Saint-Georges Chevalier de Saint-Georges]], a real eighteenth-century composer and musician known as "the black Mozart", who did in fact perform at Versailles, and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (father of Creator/AlexandreDumas) who was Saint-Georges' student and later a general during the French Revolutionary Wars. It's especially jarring considering there is an Orientalist portrait of Madame de Pompadour dressed like a Turkish sultana and being served by a black slave girl -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C._van_Loo_Sultane.jpg an exotic possession, for crying out loud.]] Angel Coulby, the actress who played the black noblewoman, also played Gwen on ''Series/{{Merlin|2008}}''.
** The episode "Human Nature", set in England just before World War I, averts this trope, as one of the students starts saying offensive things to Martha, and John Smith seems to find it utterly believable that Martha might not understand the concept of fiction. Smith's love interest understandably is rather incredulous when Martha claims to be a doctor, remarking that a ''woman'' doctor was conceivable but not "one of your colour" as said to Martha's face.
** The titular character of ''The Next Doctor'' had a black female companion, Rosita, in 1851. She gets treated like anyone else in the story except for two brief almost missable moments. The first is when the [[spoiler:villainess asks whether the Doctor "paid [her] to speak," which could be either a servitude reference or merely an implied suggestion that she thinks Rosita is a prostitute. The second is at the end when they live happily ever after and Jackson Lake makes a comment about her being his son's nursemaid.]]
** Averted with Martha's presence in "The Shakespeare Code": Martha initially worries that being black in 1600s London will cause trouble, but the Doctor laughs it off, assuring her that London has all types of people. In this case, he's right. Elizabethan London had [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_of_black_immigrants_in_London a significant African population]]--large enough that Elizabeth complained about it on multiple occasions. It was also about half a century before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and thus, racialized slavery, really took off.
** Isabella and her father from "The Vampires of Venice" are an exception. As a nexus of trade all across the Mediterranean, Venice would have been home to all sorts. (But she also has modern-day straightened hair.)
** UsefulNotes/RichardNixon has ''two'' black agents in his security detail in ''The Impossible Astronaut''. (In reality, Nixon did have at least one.)
** The series 9 opener "The Magician's Apprentice" features some black extras in Essex in 1138, leading to some debate as to whether this is realistic or not.
** Justified in the Series 10 episode "Thin Ice", set in London in the early 19th century (the Regency Era) when Bill notes that London seems "a bit more black" than the movies suggest. The Doctor replies that "history is a whitewash", while also indicating that Jesus was black, too.

* On the ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'' episode "Film/WarriorOfTheLostWorld", the guys remark on how the [[GangOfHats gangs of hats]] include black Nazis and white ninjas.

* Inverted ''Film/MulanRiseOfAWarrior'', where the king of the Rouran Khaganate has a white court musician (played by Russian-Latvian singer Music/{{Vitas}}). It's not ''too'' implausible given that Northern Asia and Eastern Europe are side by side and Chinese historical accounts referenced giants with red hair and green or blue eyes. Furthermore, parts of Western China (modern UsefulNotes/{{Xinjiang}}) were inhhabited by Tocharians, a Nordic-looking and Indo-European speaking people.

* In ''Film/MulanRiseOfAWarrior'', the king of the Rouran Khaganate has a white court musician (played by Russian-Latvian singer Music/{{Vitas}}). It's not ''too'' implausible given that Northern Asia and Eastern Europe are side by side and Chinese historical accounts referenced giants with red hair and green or blue eyes. Furthermore, parts of Western China (modern UsefulNotes/{{Xinjiang}}) were inhhabited by Tocharians, a Nordic-looking and Indo-European speaking people.