You're watching your favorite sit-com — it's fluff, but it's harmless fluff, right? And you're laughing at the latest antics of the cast, when all of a sudden it hits you — "Aren't there any black people in New York City?"
You've just run across a program guilty of Monochrome Casting. The melanin content of the actors simply doesn't vary much at all. Almost all of these programs consist of either an all-black or all-white cast; given that the reasons for this trope's existence are primarily based on demographics, it would not be shocking to see more Hispanic versions in the near future, however.
It is not yet a Discredited Trope — a product of the Leave It To Beaver era — but it still holds more sway than most people realize. Most often, this trope is seen in sit-coms, where it is used to help target a single demographic.
Sometimes you'll get a Token Minority or Token White appearing in a walk-on role in the show; if he's a black man on a white show, then he's probably there for a Very Special Episode about racism, while if he's a white guy on a primarily African-American show, then he's probably there because the writers were in need of Acceptable Targets.
Now, some shows are set in environments where it might even seem forced to have any sort of ethnic diversity; this trope doesn't apply to these programs so much. For instance, the rarified world of the superwealthy that often dominates in Soap Operas really doesn't have many blacks or Hispanics (except as servants, and that might be a bit too much realism for your negative-publicity averse executive); likewise, the Chicago public-housing projects displayed in Good Times were pretty much all-black by the time the show aired in the 70s. Similarly, much of Europe was almost all-white until recent decades, and there are small towns in rural America that just don't have much in terms of diversity. It's when a show exists in an environment where diversity would be almost mandatory that they can be accused guilty of monochrome casting.
Historically, Monochrome Casting was (at least in part) often the fault of Executive Meddling, either overt or covert. Before about 1965, it was standard for television stations and movie chains operating in the southern US to edit movies and TV shows to remove non-stereotypical African-American characters. Maids and criminals were fine, scientists and soldiers were not. If an African-American character was so intrinsic to the show that he or she couldn't be edited out, the show or movie simply wouldn't be shown in the South*
A strong contender for Crowning Moment of WTF came in May 1970, when a Mississippi state commission voted that the state's public networks would not air Sesame Street, stating that "Mississippi was not yet ready" for the show's integrated cast
. This naturally would cut into profits, so producers tended to make the entire cast white. One of the first shows to challenge this was Hogan's Heroes, whose producers cast a black actor as Hogan's second-in-command/camp genius specifically to make it impossible for Southern stations to edit the character out.
Modern viewers often expect Monochrome Casting in situations where it would be historically inaccurate. It would be, for instance, accurate to show black people living around the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's time, but nobody in our time would expect that.
Occasionally Truth in Television, because even in places with ethnically diverse populations, it's not uncommon to see people clustered together in monochromatic groups due to self-segregation.
Contrast People of Hair Color. Compare Humans Are White, a similar phenomenon in unrealistic works. Contrast the Five-Token Band, where it seems the writers were trying too hard in the opposite direction. May overlap with Pop Culture Isolation. Compare Plenty of Blondes. Compare Chromosome Casting, the equivalent of this trope in sex (when characters of only one sex appear in a work).
Examples:
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Anime And Manga
Well...almost all of anime, period. But this is very Truth in Television as Japan's population is less than 1% non-Japanese, and almost all of that minority is also Asian. However, if there's ever an American in anime, they're almost always a blond haired and blue eyed white person (although they may or not be part Japanese). Most depictions of the USA in anime avert this, throwing in a Token Black or two. Don't expect to see any "brown" people, though.
Japan's growing Brazilian migrant worker population does get them some inclusions, but they're rare.
Urd and Her Mother Hild from Ah! My Goddess are examples of brown-skinned major characters, although neither is human.
The later seasons of Naruto added in several black ninja like Killer Bee and Omoi.
Averted in Michiko To Hatchin, which features a dark-skinned biracial protaganist and a number of black and Latino characters. Atsuko, another major character, is half-black and half-Japanese.
Blood+ has a Japanese protagonist but takes place across several different countries. Two members of the heroine's supporting cast are white, while another is black. Additionally, the lead antagonist's Dragon is a black man.
Fullmetal Alchemist has a mostly European cast, but there are a number of exceptions. Paninya and Jerso are both black, and a number of characters of varying degress of importance come from the fictional nations of Ishbal and Xing, which are stand-ins for the Middle East and China respectively.
Afro Samurai is another aversion. It doesn't hurt that it was made to cater to an American audience first.
Averted in Tiger & Bunny. Set in Not-Manhattan, there are several members of ethnic minorities among the recurring characters. The protagonist is Japanese, Antonio is of Latin American descent, Pao-Lin (a minor character) is Chinese and Nathan is African-American. Ozaki mentions that they made sure even the Caucasians had a specific European ancestry instead of just being "American" (Agnes is French; Ivan, Yuri and Mr. Legend are Russian; Karina is Nordic, etc.) — the only exceptions being Keith (who sports pretty much the definition of an All American Face) and deuteragonist Barnaby (who is basically a blond Hollywood Nerdminus the blue eyes).
Averted with Blaster Knuckle, which was set in the American South and featured a black protagonist.
Eyeshield 21 had a recurring team of American rivals, which were fairly diverse. The character Patrick "Panther" Spence was a black teen with a fairly large role.
Of note is Seinen manga Me And The Devil Blues, a story chronicling the life of blues musician Robert Johnson had he actually won his talent from the devil, as some of the more popular rumors surrounding his mysterious rise to prominence dictated. The protagonist and many of the supporting characters are strikingly African American, with a range of body and facial types rarely seen any where, let alone manga or anime, while the lancer and most of the rest of the cast are Caucasian.
Averted in Darker than Black, which, though set in Japan, has a large number of foreign characters.
Averted in Tsuritama. The main protagonist's grandmother is French (thus making him mixed-race) and Akira, one of the four leads, is Indian. The villainous Cosmopolitan Council also contains white, African, and Arabic members.
Again averted with Soul Eater, which takes place at a mystical school with a fairly diverse student body. The author even mentioned that he explicitly created the character Kilik because he felt there were very few positive black characters in the world of anime and manga.
Black Lagoon also averts this, having a racially-diverse cast.
Red Garden is set in New York City and features an Ambiguously Brown girl named Claire as one of the leads. Her race isn't made clear, but she's implied to be biracial, possibly of African or Latina ancestry. There are also several minor characters of color.
Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is a rare Anime series that has a black character (the aforementioned Garterbelt) given title billing.
Averted in Basquash! which has a good number of Ambiguously Brown characters as well as Miyuki, who appears to be of mixed African and Japanese descent.
Jormungand is another Anime with a fairly-diverse main cast. Jonah is South Asian, Wiley is African American, there are several Ambiguously Brown characters, ECT.
Comic Books
Legion of Super-Heroes: Again, a product of the 50s when including ethnic characters probably never crossed the creators' minds, though there was at least one non-white character... an alien, Chameleon Boy, who was- orange.
Compounded when they tried to fix it in the 70s by adding a Black hero, Tyroc, who came from... an island with only Black people. That appeared on Earth only intermittently.
And all the black people in the world had gone to this island, and they were all racist, openly crying their hatred of whites. Unfortunate Implications abound.
Birds Of Prey fell into this, as while the team has had several minority "guest operatives" who have shown up from time to time, the core cast has historically been entirely white. Even the writer, Gail Simone, said she thought it was a problem. She mentioned that at various points, she unsuccessfully tried to get Vixen, Rocket (both black), Cassandra Cain (half-Asian) and Renee Montoya (Hispanic) added to the team. In the case of Cassandra, Simone even claims she had written up Cass' debut issue before editorial informed her that she would not be able to use her. The 2011 relaunch was the first time in the title's history that a minority woman (Japanese heroine Katana) was featured as part of the core cast. The character Strix (an African American member of the Court of Owls) was later added to the team.
The original X-Men team consisted of all white superheroes. This would later be averted in the series relaunch by Chris Claremont.
In Spider-Man, the non-white population of New York City seems to consist of... Robbie. (Okay, sometimes we see his son, too.) They've had other minority characters, but none of them stood the test of time. To avoid this in adaptations, SpectacularRace Lifted half the cast, and Ultimate uses mostly minority heroes like Luke Cage and White Tiger as part of the team.
At New York Comic-Con 2012, Rick Remender self-deprecatingly stated that the line-up of his Uncanny Avengers book was "Crackerfest 2012" in regards to the lack of minorities on the team. Japanese hero Sunfire will be joining the cast in the second story arc in order to offset this a little.
Film
The film Notting Hill had superb CGI. Not a single black person to be seen. If you don't live in London you may not be aware that in fact the Notting Hill neighborhood has enough of a black population that the Notting Hill Carnival is a major annual event largely celebrating black culture in England. The carnival was started in 1958 precisely as a way of fostering racial harmony after some black immigrants and some white Londoners sympathetic to blacks were beaten up by some white gang members.
Star Wars: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were only three minorities, not counting the Space Jews, and in the very first film all the visible actors on screen were white—only James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader wasn't. Lucas repeatedly defended himself, claiming he had auditioned nonwhites for some of the major roles (including a black actor for Han Solo and a Japanese actor for Obi-Wan) but just happened to end up with only whites. In any case, the later films all featured nonwhites in major roles, most notably Lando. The prequels also revealed that all of the clonetroopers are Maori. Not to mention Badass Jedi Master Mace Windu.
The film Young Guns was based on the real life of gunfighter Billy the Kid, showing his exploits in New Mexico, culminating in a huge gunfight with the U.S. Ninth Cavalry. But you wouldn't know from the film that New Mexico has a significant Hispanic and Spanish-speaking population, or that the Ninth Cavalry were a black regiment.
Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain is set in Montmartre, an area of Paris with a large immigrant population, but the cast, with the exception of Jamel Debouze, is almost exclusively white.
The film based on the book He's Just Not That Into You, which takes place in Baltimore, has already been lambasted by viewers due to the entire cast being strictly white, sans one Sassy Black Woman making an offhand remark on a park bench.
One of the things dating John Hughes films is that none of the leads are minorities (a few of the actors are, but the untrained eye would never notice), and that the closest thing to a non-Caucasian character with lines was Long Duk Dong. Hughes, however, based the fictious suburb of Shermer, where most of his movies set on his hometown, Northbrook, which is 90% white.
"They had a movie of the future called Logan’s Run. There ain’t no niggers in it. I said, “Well, white folks ain’t planning for us to be here."
The 1993 film The Meteor Man has an entirely black cast save for one white mobster.
Pretty much everyone in The Romantics is white.
Friday has an all black cast since this film takes place in South Central, Los Angeles. The sequels have added a few whites and Hispanics into the main cast.
Woody Allen films used to be notorious for presenting a very non-diverse version of New York.
Justified in that this was the era where when you needed a black actor you would put blackface on them.
In spite of Gene Roddenberry's good intentions, many Star Trek films were fairly monochromatic. The most notable example occurs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where the ethnically diverse superhumans from "Space Seed" became generically European.
Cloud Atlas has garnered quite a bit of controversy for having white actors using Yellow Face to pass off as Asians, instead of you know, actually bothering to cast Asian actors.
Although there are a healthy number of non-white characters in the film, who also go through various cases of Race Lift to play different roles.
Everyone's white in Ferris Bueller's Day Off except for a school mate and some dancers in the street parade montage.
One of the criticisms originally launched at The Last Airbender is that while the Avatar The Last Airbender was set in an Asian influenced world where Caucasians were basically nonexistent, instead populated by Tibetan, Inuit, Chinese and Japanese-inspired characters. The entire main cast was very white. Later the white-actor playing Zuko was changed to the Indian Dev Patel. Zuko was white-skinned in the show, but at least it was a change.
This is why the Race Lift exists, because several books feature predominantly white characters and more diversity is added to films and TV series.
According to this blogpost, in all of the orginal series of Goosebumps novels, there were only 20 explicitly non-white characters, of whom 45% were Egyptians (in novels about Mummies, no less).
Virtually everything by Bret Easton Ellis. This is kind of the point, however.
Almost all the main characters in the Harry Potter series are white, which is not surprising considering that the UK is 92% white. There are a decent number of minorities among the supporting cast. Five supporting characters (Dean Thomas, Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Blaise Zabini) are black. Parvati and Padma Patil are Indian. Cho Chang, Su Li, and Lilith Moon are all East Asian.
Actually averted in the Privilege series by Kate Brian. The book is a Spin-Off of the Private series, about Ariana Osgood after she escapes prison and starts a new life at an elite private school under the name Briana Leigh Covington. Although most of the characters that are important to the plot are white, there are some non-white people such as Soomie (Asian), Tahira (Arab) and Zuri (African). This probably one of the few cases where an almost completely white setting could be justified, because in the U.S., the richest of the rich are usually white people coming from old money.
The books of Twilight featured a cast of made of whites and Native Americans. Several characters were given a Race Lift in the movie such as Eric (Asian), Angela (Hispanic), Laurent and Tyler (black).
Word Of God says that Ben is supposed to be Asian.
How Not To Write A Novel called this "The Country Club", noting that unless one's novel happens to be set in rural Sweden, the reader may start to get the undesired impression that some form of ethnic cleansing has taken place.
Live Action TV
Seinfeld is frequently mentioned for the rarity of minority characters who appear. However, the random "person on the street" bit parts are often some sort of minority. ShowrunnerLarry David would winkingly own up to it in his later series Curb Your Enthusiasm in the episode "Affirmative Action", in which a black woman brings up that there were no black people on Seinfeld.
Friends rarely has any significant minority characters, though there is the occasional exception. The pilot featured a prominent black character as a comic foil for Monica, but she was written out to focus on the core cast.
The creators of Friends did take in the criticism and therefore cast a black woman as a love interest for Joey and Ross in the later seasons. While it was nice of them, it also was kind of odd, considering the Monochrome Casting of the love interests prior to her.
In the second or third season, Ross did date Julie for a while, who was Asian.
AMC's The Walking Dead focuses on a group of zombie apocalypse survivors around Atlanta, Georgia... a city with the largest black population in the United States. The diversity on the show as of Season Two? One Asian and one black man. Made worse by the fact the graphic novel series the show is based on was more diverse.
Michonne was added to the cast in season 3 after the criticism, though of course she didn't join the cast until relatively late in the comic as well. It didn't help that, four episodes after Michonne joined the show, T-Dog died.
The funny thing is that the only time the show did accurately portray Atlanta's demographics was when the survivors went to the prison. 3 of the 5 surviving prisoners were black, 1 was Hispanic, and 1 was white. Since then, all of the prisoners have died except for the white one.
How I Met Your Mother has an all-white primary cast, but a few recurring minority characters (cab driver Ranjit and Barney's gay black brother). In the seventh season both Barney and Robin's love interests were minorities, but they are now gone for good. Ted's lack of variety in the girls he dates may be a necessity of the series' central gimmick: given we've seen the kids and they're both very white, an ethnic love interest is obviously not going to be the mother.
The Class, with Friends creator David Crane as an executive producer, was highly criticised for having an all-white cast, especially considering Philadelphia has a very large black population.
The trope was notably averted back in the day by I Love Lucy, featuring the Cuban Ricky Ricardo married to the red-headed and all-Amercian Lucy. Producers were reluctant to pair Lucille Ball with a Cuban man, and Ball had to jump through a number of hoops to get Arnaz cast. One of the reasons the show is called I Love Lucy is to have an implied reference to Desi's character without having to state his name. However, at the time, Cubans were seen as "foreign" rather than a completely different "race" than white Americans. Therefore, Lucy and Desi were not considered to be a mixed-race couple.
Interestingly, while most Cubans are black or Indian, most Cuban-Americans are white. This was probably because white Cubans were able to easily immigrate following the communist revolution in 1959.
UPN has been infamous for having entire blocks of programming with overwhelmingly black casts. But most of those shows were made to be an alternative to the all white shows.
During the brief period where university life at "UC Sunnydale" was shown on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there were almost no Asians, even though the actual University of California has over 40%. You can count the black characters on Buffy with both hands, and only one for the characters that survive.
To be fair, Sunnydale was apparently based off of Santa Barbara, which has an extremely small black and Asian population. However, there was a curious lack of Hispanics in Sunnydale, who make up almost 40% of Santa Barbara's population.
Lampshaded in real life at Dragoncon 2012, where James Marsters bluntly stated that he'd never in his life encountered a real town that was as white as Sunnydale.
Parodied in an SNL skit where a black waiter refused to serve Ashton Kutcher after the actor grudgingly admitted that there were no major minority characters in That '70s Show (which actually isn't true - one of the main characters, Fez was from a minority, though it was never determined which one).
The closest you can get to saying there are minorities in iCarly is that Miranda Cosgrove sometimes looks slightly Asian. T-Bo and Principal Franklin are the only recurring non-white characters, and there are no Asian recurring characters at all. It was once Lampshaded in a fanfic with the line: "Seattle has the diversity of a corn field!"
Star Trek: The Original Series tried very hard to avoid monochrome casting, in line with Gene Roddenbery's views on race becoming a non-issue in Earth's future. This required deliberate effort on the part of the production staff, as, even in the mid-1960s, the network production system tended to fill all spots for extras with generic, physically fit white males (age 25 to 45) unless otherwise specified. As production values slipped in the second and third seasons of the series, crewmen and civilians fell back on the generic white male Hollywood stockpile.
Monochromatic casting applied to all segments of American television before the 1970s. When Bill Cosby first appeared on The Tonight Show in the 1960s, doing his stand-up comedy act, the only make-up on hand at NBC was a base used previously for Lena Horne, who is so much paler than usual for American blacks that she used to be attacked as a "mulatto" by hostile white (and, occasionally, black) hecklers. Cosby was so pale on screen that night ("Live in black & white!") his family thought something had been done to him or that he was ill.
The Sci-Fi Channel adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's Literature/Earthsea series was an egregious mix of Monochrome Casting and They Just Didn't Care. Leguin intentionally created a fantasy world where a variety of dark-skinned people make up the majority of the populace (she even makes a point of distinguishing between the different shades of brown), with the only white people being barbarians... and the movie starred a bunch of white people and a Magical Negro. Leguin has some choice things to say about the production.
Queer As Folk is somewhat disappointing since the show is about gay life in Pittsburgh, which has a healthy minority population, yet one has to keep one's eye's peeled to even see non-white extras.
Parodied by Mad TV with the sketch "Pretty White Kids With Problems." It aired when Dawson's Creek was at its prime. A different sketch called "Devon's Creek" was Dawson with all-black cast members. Problem is, because the entire writing staff, production crew, and executive board were white, the lines sounded like every black-comedian stereotype of white people.
Another Mad TV sketch spoofed Friends, featuring a black girl as Ross' blind date, which shocks the entire gang. The narration states that this was done due to "a direct order from the United States Supreme Court".
At the very beginning of The West Wing, all the main characters were cast as white. When the NAACP criticized the show, the show's creators agreed with them — so they revived the character of Charlie Young (who was cut from the pilot somewhere between script and screen) and introduced him in the third episode. The characters on the show actually lampshade the situation by being seriously concerned with how it will look for the one visible black staff member to be the President's errand boy. The show gets better later on with several black Congresspeople and a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and National Security Advisor.
Home Improvement, ostensibly takes place in Detroit. There were very few black characters than should be realistically expected, though this is presumable a wealthy, white-bread suburb.
Detroit was a mixed-race city until about the 1970s, at which point "white flight" kicked in with a vengeance (mostly in response to race riots).
Similarly seen in the spin-off Melrose Place, which had one black character during its first season who quickly vanished due to lack of storyline.
Even though Aaron had passed by the time it came out, the sequel series fixed this featuring a black and Arab (even though he's played by a Hispanic) in the main cast and an Indian recurring character.
Dawson's Creek. No black people, even in the Boston episodes.
Except the High School principal and his daughter, played by Black actors.
EastEnders - Sweet Baby Jesus. The show takes place in one of the most ethnically diverse parts of one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world and somehow manages to be 90 percent white. Worse yet, this is a fairly recent development. When the show started in 1985, the area's demographics were roughly the same and you could count the non-white actors on one hand. It's like the producers hadn't visited the area since the fifties.
The Bachelor/The Bachelorette is like this, with only white people (with the occasional light-skinned Hispanic or Asian) on the show. And there's absolutely no excuse for this, given that there are twenty-plus contestants every season.
The problem, is that the bachelor, and bachelorette in question is almost always white. And unfortunately Interracial Dating is still kinda taboo in Real Life (unlike in tv/film). The bachelor, and bachelorette may also have specified the ethnicity of the contestants.
And now there's a lawsuit being filed by two African-American men who claim that they auditioned for the show and were not given equal audition time solely because of their race.
Laverne and Shirley takes place in 1950s Milwaukee which was in the middle of a massive influx of migrant Black workers from the south, most of whom came to work at Breweries like the one where the titular characters were employed.
In Noah's Arc, almost everyone any of the characters interacts with is either black or latino. You can count the number of white people seen throughout the series on one hand.
While the show did have a few black characters in the past As The World Turns large cast was all white by the time it went off the air.
This has been a major problem with most soap operas. Ironically, this might be a Justified Trope, as most are set in wealthy white-bread suburbs. However, The Bold And The Beautiful is set in the melting pot of Los Angeles but has a cast almost completely devoid of minorities, and the few who are present often fall into patronizing Model Minority roles who are often relegated to the background—yet another problem often seen on soaps.
Averted in shows like Days of Our Lives and especially Passions which had several black, Hispanic, and mixed race main characters—in fact, the latter show boasted one of the most diverse casts on daytime and made valid use of all minority characters.
Averted in The Cosby Show which, though the main family was primarily black, had plenty of reoccuring non-black chaaracters who weren't just one-time roles.
This is the standard for Australian soaps - Home and Away and Packed To The Rafters are two more prominent examples, although unlike Neighbours, they aren't set in Australia's second most diverse city (Melbourne).
Recently, Neighbours has added the Kapoors, but only as a result of active campaigning from UK fans who desired more diversity.
The co-showrunner of Midsomer Murders was sacked after stating with astonishing bluntness in an interview with the Radio Times that he thought that it was a success because it was a "bastion of Englishness", and that to maintain that he would never cast a non-white actor in it.
There were very few black characters in Frasier, but unlike the New York City examples of Friends and Seinfeld, the black population of Seattle is very small and highly concentrated in an area far from the characters' affluent hangouts. However, the black people that did appear had quite a broad scope. One black recurring character was "Dr." Mary, a stereotypical Sassy Black Woman who Frasier was terrified of criticizing for fear of being seen as racist — an unusually no-nonsense approach to racial issues for a sitcom. On the other hand, Frasier's Sitcom Archnemesis Cam Winston was a wealthy, fussy snob very much like Frasier himself, and the fact that he was black was a complete non-issue. Cam's mother was also briefly used as a love interest for Frasier's father, Martin.
However, Frasier drops the ball when it comes to Asians, who do make up a large percentage of Seattle's population.
And for what it's worth, there were often black extras used in the various coffee house and party scenes. They may not have gotten speaking parts, but it is refreshing to see black characters as part of elite, wealthy social scenes.
Sex and the City was also set in an unrealistically white version of New York City. Out of the parade of boyfriends and lovers the girls had over the course of six seasons, the non-white ones can be counted on maybe one hand. Reportedly, Cynthia Nixon complained to the producers about the Unfortunate Implications of this for years, until they finally threw her a bone by casting Blair Underwood as Miranda's onscreen lover.
Averted in the prequel series The Carrie Diaries, though in a way this raises further Unfortunate Implications about why Carrie broke off contact with all her non-white friends.
Roseanne. Particularly jarring considering it's one of the few working-class sitcoms in the history of American television.
Although, in one episode, Dan did mention that their hometown of Lanford, Illinois, was only 5% black, so it's possible that Lanford was simply one of those small towns that does end up being very monochrome, often as a byproduct of "White Flight" out of the cities into the suburbs (which do exist.)
Lanford was often referred to as being a long drive from Chicago — a few hours away, and an hour from Elgin. This was a small town that was largely white, as is often the case in the Midwest. The racial makeup of the town is consistent with what you'd find in that region.
Chuck and Marie show up in earlier seasons, but don't feature as prominently as Nancy, Bonnie, Crystal, or even Arnie.
The HBO series Girls has gotten backlash over this, especially since it was touted and marketed as a supposedly progressive comedy and takes place in New York, one of the most ethnically diverse cities on the planet. The show's creator Lena Dunham has since apologized and promised to add some women of color to the cast for the series' second season. In the second season premiere, the main character Hannah dates a black man named Sandy (Donald Glover).
Played mostly straight in Charmed, with a few aversions. The black Daryl Morris was a side character in season 1 but promoted to regular in season 2. The show did feature a lot of white characters but there were a few recurring minorities such as Paige's boss in season 4 and the Big Bad of season 7 who was Middle Eastern. Played straight in another variation though - set in San Francisco and yet no recurring gay characters, though a few do appear as one-episode characters.
Averted with Amy Sherman-Palladino's other show, Gilmore Girls, which had two minority characters in the main cast for every season and many recurring minority characters, as well as having Latina Alexis Bledel playing white Rory Gilmore. Most of the romantic interests for Lorelai and Rory were white, though. Even Lane Kim was paranoid about dating Korean boys as she was afraid of dating someone her parents would approve of.
Alexis Biedel is a white Latina, though.
The popular British Panel GameQI has a ten-year run and had about a hundred comedians appear on the show. A grand whopping three of them were comedians of colour (Meera Syal in "Aquatic Animals", Reg D. Hunter in "Fashion" and "Jungles" and Shappi Khorsandi in "Journalism").
America's Test Kitchen: With a name like that for a public TV show, you would think that non-white chefs would have been cast. Not so.
Professional Wrestling
This was a problem in pro wrestling right up until the 1990s. It was rare for black wrestlers to be booked to win titles (Junk Yard Dog, one of the biggest fan favorites of the '80s, never won a title at all) until Ron Simmons defeated Vader for the WCW Championship in 1992. As far as anyone can determine, there were no black main-eventers on WWE television until Zeus fought Hulk Hogan in 1989 - and it wouldn't happen again until Mabel challenged Diesel for the WWE Championship in 1995, and lost. Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki did hold the WWE Championship briefly in 1979, but his run was later stricken from the record book, and an Asian or Pacific Islander would not win the title again until Yokozuna in 1993. Pedro Morales was WWE Champion for a while in the '70s, but the first WWE Champion to have no European ancestry at all was The Rock (half-black, half-Samoan).
Junkyard Dog is actually an aversion for the era, he was the top star of Mid-South Wrestling for close to 5 years in the early '80s with a number of singles and tag title reigns.
Tabletop RPG
The Vampire The Masquerade sourcebooks for New Orleans, Atlanta, and Milwaukee are conspicuously lacking in minority NPC characters, even though all three cities have either a black majority or plurality.
Looking at the future of humanity depicted in Warhammer40000, one has to wonder what happened to the 75% of humanity which isn't white. They exist, but are creepily rare.
Though with miniatures sculpts its hard to differentiate ethnicity without it coming off as a stereotype.
Theater
Parodied in the Reduced Shakespeare Company's All The Great Books (Abridged), where one of the characters, a community college drama teacher, claims to have directed the very first all-white production of Ain't Misbehavin'.
The Other RSC also Lampshade their monochrome cast (of three, so maybe Justified) in the Cmplt Wrks f Shkspr when they come to Othello; they note that none of them really feel qualified to play Othello, but Adam is going to have a go. No blackface involved - he comes on with a string of toy boats around his neck, having misunderstood the term 'Moor'.
A production had the role played by a black guy, with the other actors shamefully admitting afterward that they had just left him to do Othello on his own because he was black. (Incidentally, the others were Hispanic and Jewish, leading to the ad-lib "We can't do Othello, but we can make a lot of jokes like this, so that's good.")
Toys
LEGO has this trope Zig-Zagged. All of their minifigures in non-licensed sets have yellow skin. This was decided to make them racially neutral, so that the balance seems appropriate for all cultures.
Web Comics
Every human in Homestuck is drawn with literally white skin. Not quite an example - Word Of Goddictates that by intent, Mukokuseki is in full effect and no-one save his Author Avatar (caucasian, coloured orange) has any defined race, or for that matter other physical characteristics beyond the basics, and that one reference to Bro being white was an error that he put in before he'd clearly established the character.
Every character in Teahouse is white. After this was pointed out to the writers, they did include a "Person of colour" (as they put it) in as a non-dialogue servant. Naturally Unfortunate Implications arose and they wrote out out a "we're not racist" blog. A non-white has yet to have any words.
One writer in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe parodied this trope by having one character, a sentient gorilla with super-speed, go off on a rant about how he was the only talking gorilla in the entire Global Guardians organization and how every single other member was human... only to have his rant deflated when two other members (an android and an alien from space, respectively) point out that they weren't human either.
Western Animation
Not even cartoons are exempt! The biggest offender was probably The Jetsons. It takes place in the far off future, but there's not a single minority to be seen.
True for the original 60s run, but averted in the 80s revival, when some non-white characters were seen.
Lampshaded and parodied in Clerks: The Animated Series, where Dante and Randal respond to viewer mail complaining about the show's Monochrome Casting. They respond by adding a new black character named Lando who does little more than wave to the guys as he passes them on the street.
Further parodied when the guys later need a helicopter pilot to get them in the air, and "Lando" is the man to do it. Cut to Lando eagerly offering to help, only to learn that Dante and Randal were talking about a different Lando; another white guy.
Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers had a black man as one of the four main heroes, and two others as one-shot villains. The rest of the human cast was white.
Averted in Justice League, which famously swapped out the white Hal Jordan version of the Green Lantern and instead chose to use the black John Stewart iteration. The move was controversial with some hardcore comic book fans, but went largely unnoticed by the general audience.
Ironically, this has led to the opposite effect now with the new movie; many DCAU fans who don't read the comics seem to believe that John Stewart is the only Green Lantern, leading to incorrect complaints that Hal Jordan was merely created as a Race Lift.
Similarly, Young Justice took steps to diversify their cast (which was mainly based off the original Teen Titans). A new, separate black Aqualad character was created, and the very minor comic character Artemis Crock was given some of the traits of Arrowette to create a half-Vietnamese main character. Over the show's course, characters such as Rocket, Mal Duncan, Bumblebee, Blue Beetle, and Static were also added.
South Park was originally meant to be this way, implying a small mountain town where Chef as the Token Minority. Eventually they had a Token Minority student namedToken as well. Nowadays the town seems to be more diverse. Minor character Kevin was identified as Asian American in one of the earlier seasons, though this is rarely brought up.
Avatar The Last Airbender has an interesting version - everyone is a fantasy Asian or Inuit, the show essentially being a medieval Asian fantasy. White people don't even seem to exist in the Avaverse.
Some fans have speculated that on the other side of the world there's a different continent with people of a Caucasion complexion (like in Real Life), though idea mostly exists to fuel fanfics and as a WMG of potential The Legend of Korra plots.
Averted in Static Shock the main characters is black, and there is a balance between various ethnicity among the cast.
Visionaries features a cast exclusively made up of white people, from minor to major characters. The only black people seen are in background group shots. Even the cancelled second toy line would not have fixed this.
