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Q: How many white males does it take to change a light bulb? A: One.
Anything you can do, he can do better. He can do anything better than you. Oh yes he can, especially if you happen to be of Asian, Indian, African, Aboriginal or Native American descent. It doesn't matter that you have spent your entire life living in the densest African jungle, being taught the ways of your ancestors since you were old enough to stand up -- the moment Mighty Whitey arrives in your town (most likely as a prisoner of war, an orphan or a lost traveler), you might as well hang up your blowpipe and take up crochet because his European (and therefore superior) genetics have pretty much made you redundant.
A common trope in 18th and 19th century adventure fiction, when vast swathes of the world were being explored and properly documented by Europeans for the first time, Mighty Whitey is a displaced white European, usually of noble descent, who ends up living with native tribespeople and not only learns their ways but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative.
Sometimes the foreign societies are shown to be realistic, three-dimensional and actually rather pleasant places to live. Indeed, sometimes the native peoples are shown to be better in some way than European society and the white man begins to despise his old home. But this doesn't diminish the inherent racism in the concept of a white guy being naturally superior to his racially different counterparts and the tone is generally that they are as good as they can be (which is not the same as being as good as a white man can be).
This original version is a Discredited Trope, but in modern-day fiction -- particularly in Hollywood movies -- Mighty Whitey pops up, not as the product of a white supremacist viewpoint, but the result of creative types trying to appeal to as broad a cross-section of society as possible in order to get their cash back. And since the majority of major Hollywood stars are white Americans, it's almost inevitable that the all-singing, all-dancing hero is also going to be registering low on the melanin count.
Remakes of shows/movies with the original trope often subvert this; for instance, making the Mighty Whitey into a dunce, and their Ethnic Scrappy sidekick into a smart, street-savvy Bad Ass.
Non-American media, such as anime, can exhibit versions of this trope tailored to their home audiences. Charlie Dog is often used as a way to set up this version of Mighty Whitey. Also, this trope can occur as an unintended side effect of writers trying to show the equality of all races and cultures -- in a tone-deaf and more than potentially offensive kind of way.
Compare Jungle Princess, Noble Savage, Only One, Cargo Cult. Contrast Positive Discrimination, Token White. See also Humans Are Special.
Original Version Examples:
Comic Books
- Iron Fist was raised from childhood in mystical city of K'un-L'un to take the title and powers of Marvel's ultimate martial artist.
- This was once played straight, but has since been retconned into a partial subversion. The current Iron Fist, as noted above, was at least RAISED in K'un-L'un, but otherwise fits the trope to a tee; the previous holder of the title, is actually from Western culture- and even though he Knows Kung Fu, his life is an utter mess. The current Fist's father, going further than that, chickened out and failed to become the Iron Fist entirely.
- The Phantom, a generational line of more than twenty white males who protect the African jungle, including tribes of native Africans.
- While he is usually drawn as white, the Phantom actually has ancestors from just about every corner of the earth. It's All There In The Manual.
- The Legion of Super-Heroes, set in 30th Century earth, for decades managed to have blue-skinned members, orange-skinned members, and green-skinned members, but no blacks or Asians. They were still almost entirely Northern European body-types right into the 1980s. When they decided to have a martial arts expert join the Legion--in 1966, before it was fashionable--they got Val Armorr, Karate Kid raised on an earth colony, allegedly of mixed human genetics, but with features and curly red-brown hair that suggested Irish ancestry, if anything.
- Inverted in the early-'80s comic Arak: Son of Thunder, in which a Native American crosses the Atlantic to become the greatest swordsman in Scandinavia.
- Recycled INSPACE in the Adam Strange comics, which used a concept nearly identical to the John Carter Of Mars books. On Earth, Adam is just an archaeologist, but he uses his jetpack to make himself the hero of the space planet Rann. Popular comic author Alan Moore later subverted this by having the Rannians still treat Adam with contempt because they have superior intellects.
- B'wana Beast, originally appearing in the DCU's Showcase #66 (1967), is called "the White God of Kilimanjaro". During Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man (1989), he passes the title to a (black) successor, who rechristens the character "Freedom Beast".
- In the Marvel comics series, Snake-Eyes, though a white guy born and raised in small-town America, proves to be a better ninja than his closest friend, a Japanese man trained from birth (though he admits that when he moved to the US his skills got a little rusty). Not entirely justified, but Storm Shadow is much better at range, and Snake-Eyes is presented as pretty much the most Bad Ass guy on the planet to begin with.
- Both parodied and played straight in the comic book Charisma Man, produced for English-speaking expatriates in Japan. The title character was a dorky Canadian unsuccessful with women in his own country - until he arrives in Japan where he instantly becomes suave and supercool, admired by all the locals and able to pick up any girl he wants. His mortal enemy is "Western Woman", the only one aware of what a loser he really is.
Film
- Subverted in Apocalypse Now, in which Colonel Kurtz becomes the leader of a native tribe, but in doing so goes absolutely bonkers. This subversion originates in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where a white trader had made himself god to an African tribe before losing his marbles.
- Any and all of those films where the Ninja master adopts a white kid and comes to love him better and consider him a better ninja than his own sons.
- The movie Beverly Hills Ninja pokes fun at this version of the trope. It features a tribe of ninjas adopting an orphan Caucasian boy whom they think will be their clan's long-prophesized "Great White Hope." Unfortunately for them, the boy grows up to be a clumsy, uncoordinated adult (played by Chris Farley) and the only way he can save the day is with the secret assistance of the ninja tribe's top-rated Japanese member.
- In The Proposition, Arthur Burns is essentially the evil version of this. He lives up in the hills, and the Aborigines are terrified of him and think he's a werewolf.
- 300 has white people kicking the crap out of black people. And men with the heads of goats. And very fat executioners with sawblades for hands. And midgets on the backs of giants with arrows. And ninjas. A-yup.
- Avoided to a degree in Forbidden Kingdom. While it's true that Jason does become a kung fu master in a short period, and is able to beat large numbers of Jade Soldiers, he is weaker than any of the other named characters.
- Mick "Crocodile" Dundee is an Australian bush expert who was raised by Aborigines. As such, he knows a lot of mystic secrets and survival tricks that serve him well in the bush, and to a lesser extent in New York. He is baffled by modern plumbing, though.
- In The Kingdom, Chris Cooper's character tells a bunch of Saudi Arabian oilworkers, rather patronizingly, they need a pump to remove a large pool of water. In the desert nation of Saudi Arabia whose economy is built on crude oil they needed an American to tell them they needed a pump?
Literature
- Lord Greystoke, AKA Tarzan, was shown in the original books to be far better suited to life in the African wilds than any of the black natives. To be fair, this might also have been because he was raised by gorillas...
- Actually the original books explicitly said that his European noble ancestry is what allowed him to shine. Eugenics was a popular topic at the time. So Yeah.
- According to Tarzan Alive by Philip Jose Farmer, Tarzan actually belonged to a group of interrelated genetic supermen descended from seven couples who were exposed to a radioactive meteorite that landed in 1795. Members of this family include Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage. One fan website
 even adds a line of African-Americans to this group.
- The long-running pulp serial The Destroyer is predicated on a prophecy that a white man will become the greatest master of the phlebotinum-laden Korean martial art of Sinanju. Main character Remo Williams is not just the prophesied white Sinanju master, he's also the incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva, making him implicitly better than the funny-colored people of two subcontinents.
- Arguably subverted in the book and the Made For TV Movie, where Remo's Korean mentor, Chiun, is not only superior in skill but also a raving racist who considers everyone who's not Korean an unsophisticated degenerate.
- Of course he's played by Joel Grey, a white guy just playing a Korean.
- Used straight in anything by Karl May. His main character (a card-carrying self-insertion, and blatant Marty Stu) manages to become blood brother and best friend to the greatest chief of a Native American tribe in the Winnetou series, and does very similar things to every culture of the Middle East in the Kara ben Nemsi books.
- Used by Conan the Barbarian, who beat up plenty of black people. However, he was a tribesman from the very cold and vicious north which made him so strong in the first place. And he certainly beat up plenty of white people, yellow people, brown people, and the occasional god to boot. Robert E Howard's message seems to be more "Non-civilized people are better" than "White people are better".
- Recycled INSPACE in the John Carter Of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. These featured an Earthman who, due to Mars's lower gravity, had super-strength compared to the humanoid inhabitants of Mars. To modern eyes, this appears to subvert expectations of Puny Earthlings who might-or-might-not be special. However, the Puny Earthlings trope had not yet evolved at the time the books were written.
- On the American frontier, from colonial times up to end of the frontier around 1900, a number of men of European and African descent joined Indian tribes and became proficient in the wilderness. The literature of the time treated most of them as morally degenerate "renegades." However, when someone thought to use them as heroes, they were marvels of stalking and tracking skill. The foremost example is Natty Bumpo, hero of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the most famous of which is The Last of the Mohicans
- In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Lord Roxton becomes the best hunter in the native village he visits. There is some justification, as he was already a big game hunter, but the A&E miniseries, to be on the safe side, portrayed him as good enough to win the respect of the natives, but by no means the best. They also omitted Zambo.
- H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines gives a surprisingly early aversion of this trope. The three English explorers find themselves caught up in an African civil war, and all of them do fairly well in battle, but only one of them (who is actually half-Danish) does anywhere near as well as the African chief. That one in question does get to kill the bad guy, but only because the chief isn't allowed to do it himself for ceremonial reasons.
- Kylie Chan's Dark Heavens trilogy in which a young, white Australian nanny (one of the worst Mary Sue characters this troper has ever encountered in commercially published fiction) with no previous training develops superhuman martial-arts skills and magic qi powers in just a few months, beats up demons and generally proves herself superior to Chinese GODS, never mind mere mortals.
Modern Version Examples:
Anime
- Lelouch vi Britania of Code Geass, a white man leading a war to drive out evil white men from Japan.
- It's subverted, though, in that one of the evil white men's top soldiers (as of halfway through season 2, ranked as the 7th best pilot in the Empire), who often singlehandedly screws up Lelouch's plans with his combat prowess, is Japanese. Also subverted in that, while Lelouch is a brilliant strategist, his piloting ability is mediocre and he's physically a weakling.
Film
- A recent example is the Tom Cruise drama The Last Samurai, in which Cruise arrives in a Japanese village, becomes a celebrated samurai warrior, wins the heart of a beautiful Japanese maiden and is, of course, the only village male to survive a brutal purge at the film's climax.
- Granted, in Real Life the same thing happened to French army captain Jules Brunet, on whom the story was based.
- The elderly Chinese kung fu master Pai Mei in Kill Bill hates skinny people, blondes, whites, women, Japanese people, and Americans. Therefore, his greatest pupil is a skinny, blonde, white American woman who speaks Japanese.
- To be fair, the other skinny blonde white American woman who speaks japanese who THOUGHT she was inherently better had her eye ripped out, and was much less skilled (she killed him by poisoning his meal), so the message comes across more of a "shut up and listen to the guy who's better than you even if he's a shouting racist who abuses you regularly.
- Pathfinder has an 11-year-old Viking boy raised by Native Americans and becoming their greatest warrior. This is somewhat justified however, as it's established that Vikings are better warriors than the Native Americans (although a lot of that is due to their metal weapons.) The boy is the best because he learns to combine the savage combat skills he learned as a child, with the patience and cunning ambush skills he picked up as a teenager.
- Big Trouble In Little China arguably subverts this by presenting a big, brawling, two-fisted white guy who thinks he's the hero, but who often gets his ass handed to him in the battle against the Big Bad. The real hero of the movie, of course, is Jack Burton's competent, martial-arts savvy, Chinese-American "sidekick."
- Last of the Mohicans is an excellent example of Mighty Whitey in traditional American literature and, hence, in classic movies. Imitations and similar characters appear in Westerns. The worst of them, in this editor's opinion, was White Comanche in which a white rancher and the most fearsome of Comanche warriors are twins, both played by . . . wait for it . . . William Shatner, complete with pale, hairless torso, round, well-fed face and stagy Captain Kirk style emoting.
- To their credit, most of the better Western movies and series avoid this trope. If a white mountain man/scout/tracker of phenomenal wilderness skill and wisdom appears, he is usually (and admittedly) no better than or slightly less skilled than the Indians he tracks. He most often serves as a Gandalf or Cassandra to the soldiers or white civilians he works for.
- Subverted in Dances With Wolves. Both the soldier who becomes Dances and the woman called Stands With A Fist were not immediately geniuses at the Native American way of life. Indeed, their early cluelessness was a source of amusement.
- The cast of the upcoming Dragon Ball live action film are all Asian. Except for, suspiciously, main character and hero Goku.
- Granted, Goku isn't really Japanese; he's not even human, being an alien from another planet. It's still odd that a popular Japanese hero is being portrayed by a white actor, but them's the breaks when you're making a movie to appeal mostly to Westerners...
- Not only is Goku being played by a white guy, so are Bulma and Piccolo. Mukokuseki makes the whole point moot anyway.
- Farewell to the King: American GI Learoyd escapes the Japanese, flees into the Borneo jungle, winds up with a headhunter tribe there, slays their best warrior in a duel, and becomes their king.
- Played with in Woody Allen's film Bananas, in which Woody Allen gets mixed up with a revolution in a fictional Latin American country. Of course, since he's Woody Allen, he isn't exactly competent, but when the revolution succeeds and the Great Leader immediately goes crazy, his underlings get rid of him and force Woody Allen to become the new dictator because Woody Allen is an "educated American."
Video Games
- Rock from the Soul Calibur series fits the trope in that he's a powerful warrior who started out as an English boy marooned in the New World. It's mainly his sheer size that accounts for much of his fighting prowess.
- And he is by no means one of the greatest characters in the game. In this tropers experience of SC 3, he was the easiest opponent to beat.
- Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat is a white man (offically half Asian but you wouldn't know it by looking at him) that was born and raised in Minnesota. He moved to China with his father after his parents divorced when he was a teenager, and became leader of the Lin Kuei; he even moved the ancient tribe to America after they were discovered, instead of just relocating somewhere in China.
- Subverted in Jade Empire, with Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard. "Mighty Whitey" is his mantra, and he's a card-carrying supremacist through and through...but if your Asian hero can out-debate him, actually fighting him isn't that hard.
- In Turok (2008 game), General Roland Kane is such a master of the ancient warrior ways of the American Indians that he ends up teaching them to Turok, a Native American marine. Justified in that it makes sense that someone who had actually studied the historical customs of Native Americans would know more about them than someone who simply happened to be of Native American descent. Turok also ultimately proves to be a superior warrior to Kane when he defeats him in a knife fight, after Kane turns out to be an evil Broken Pedestal.
Live Action TV
- Subverted in Heroes; when Hiro goes back in time and meets the great Japanese hero Takezo Kensei, he discovers that Kensei's actually a white man. He then goes on to discover that Kensei is not nearly the patron of bravery and honor that myth has made him into, and finds himself trying to hammer Kensei into the role that history has made for him. Kensei eventually undergoes a Face Heel Turn and it is Hiro who ends up inspiring the Takezo Kensei legend.
- Subverted in Stargate SG-1. In one episode, Colonel Mitchell had his own Last Samurai moment, after being captured by the Sodan tribe ("the best Jaffa warriors ever"), he's taught their fighting style prior to a ritualistic one-on-one deathmatch. Mitchell rapidly learns their fighting style, and even uses it in later episodes to easily dispatch Jaffa Mooks. However, Teal'c (who in addition to being non-human, also happens to have dark skin) still effortlessly pwns him, on multiple occasions.
Real Life
- This actually happened to some whites. For example, during World War One there was the famous Lawrence of Arabia, who helped lead the Arabs of the Hedjaz in a successful revolt against the Ottoman Empire and greatly aided the British Army in the Middle East by doing so. Of course, he was also half-Arab, and his success wasn't due so much to his fighting skill (negligible, he was a wuss) as to his access to modern weapons and his natural skill as a guerilla leader.
- T.E. Lawrence was half-Arab? His father was Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, an Anglo-Irish landowner, and his mother was Sarah Lawrence, a Scotswoman.
- Wuss? The guy who fought a hard guerilla war in the middle of a desert while riding a white horse or a scary 1910-era motorcycle? That's Bad Ass.
- The real-life Lawrence of Arabia, not the six-foot tall Aryan movie version.
- A more modern example is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, better known as 'Subcomandante Marcos.' Born to (white) Spanish parents in Tampico, Mexico - Vicente became a hero figure to the indigenous Mayan tribes of southern Mexico.
- An earlier example would be the (possibly mythical) Gonzalo Guerrero, who ended up captured by the Mayan's in the early 1500's, eventually earned their respect as a warrior, and died fighting his spanish countrymen.
- This troper own a french geography high-school book written in the 1930's, the whole part about the french colonial empire is based on this trope. They even put a photo of a french adult standing aside a 11-12 year old african girl in order to show how "physically superior" the french/white were supposed to be.
Non-White Examples:
Film
- The Thirteenth Warrior features a reversal: cultured Muslim diplomat Ahmad Ibn Fadlan leaves his country with some Vikings to go north. He learns their language, fights very well and proves to be a valiant fighter.
Anime
- Domon Kasshu in G Gundam
- Hell, pick just about any Real Robot Humongous Mecha series you can think of. The Super Robot Wars series really tends to point it out: For so many supposedly international organizations, there sure are a hell of a lot of Japanese people compared to any other ethnicity.
- Subverted in Super Dimension Fortress Macross Maximillian Jenius, The Ace who bangs the Green Skinned Space Babe, although his actual ethnicity is debatable, certainly isn't Japanese.
- Often subverted and ridiculed in Nangoku Shounen Papuwakun, a series in which Shintarou, the Number One most competent warrior in the Ganma army, is marooned on an island in the southern seas. Although Shintarou often tries to introduce elements of his own culture, it usually either goes terribly wrong or is revealed to have already existed in some way on the island. Shintarou, throughout the story, is also relegated to the role of housekeeper for Papuwa, the only other human on the island at his arrival, who is a young boy...and much stronger than Shintarou.
- In a rather odd example, Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix: Sun is about a Korean soldier who flees to Japan after his kingdom is deafeated by the Tang Dynasty forces & eventually becomes a feudal lord & a major player in the historical Jinshin War. In a bit of a subversion, he is also invited to join a tribe of Noble Savage Shinto wolf-spirits (because his face was cut off by the Chinese & replaced with a wolf's), but declines because he feels he'd be a burden to them, having no supernatural powers of his own.
Literature
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