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"He's a diversity double-whammy!"
"Now let me introduce to you my team: Disabled Ethnic, Teenage Poofter, and Woman. Don't talk to them, they're just here to tick boxes."
Called a "twofer" by media analysts. A cast member or show participant which represents two Token Minority groups at once. More stark when most other participants on a show are white males.
Many news broadcasting teams have a white male, and a female minority member (usually black, Asian, or brown (often of Hispanic heritage). This allows them to have a diverse appearing team even though the number of people on their crew is small. This "twofer" is a practice that is common in the industry, and is commonly criticized by media watchdogs and minority interest groups. In particular, the complaint that comes up frequently is that it limits the roles and jobs available to men of color. Unfortunately some of these complaints are themselves rife with Unfortunate Implications, since they tend to treat minorities as an either-or phenomenon, so e. g. only heterosexual males count as non-twofer representatives of an ethnic group, while gays and women as well as members of religious minorities fall under automatic suspicion.
Of course, women are not actually a minority in terms of numbers, but count as such in media because of the long history of their being marginalized.
Especially when the cast is mixed in its gender, ethnical, religious etc. makeup, it often happens that you find individuals who belong to several minorities at the same time, e. e. as representative of the "melting pot" of an immigrant society through the children of an ethnically mixed couple.
Also it should be noted that there can be strong correlations between belonging to one type of minority and another, for instance in a global context most adherents of non-Christian religions also happen to belong to non-"white" ethnic groups, which from U.S. perspective makes most Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists etc. worldwide automatic "twofers" (and the female ones "threefers").
Note: Obviously, this trope is not limited to combining just two Token Minority groups.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach has Kaname Tosen. He's black and he's blind. What more do you need?
- Simon from Durarara!! is a black Russian who sells sushi.
- Nathan Seymore (Fire Emblem) from Tiger & Bunny who is a gay black man.
- Jun Honoo from Great Mazinger -the sequel to Mazinger Z- and Mazinkaiser. She is female, half-black AND half-foreign.
- Atsuko Jackson from Michiko To Hatchin is presumably half-black and half-Japanese. Michiko Malandro, the title character, is of mixed Japanese and South American ancestry.
- Miyuki from Basquash! is half-black and half-Japanese.
Comic Books
- The X-Men and their spin-offs contain numerous members of various minorities, so it is no surprise that a great many X-characters belong to several at the same time, especially since the launch of the "All-New All-Different" team in 1975. For instance:
- Dr. Cecilia Reyes from is a "threefer": an Afro-Puerto Rican female (technically a "fourfer" once you remember she is a mutant).
- Along similar lines, Armando Munoz AKA Darwin is also Afro-Latino.
- And let's not forget Ororo Munroe, aka. Storm. At one point in the comics, another character actually points out that she seems to have an even mix of African, Asian, and Caucasian features.
- The somewhat mysterious origin of the Asian/"Asian" component to her features (which are completely atypical for the African community she comes from, and seemingly unique only to her and her maternal ancestors) is actually a plot point at various times.
- The original intent was that her unusual appearance was a minor cosmetic mutation alongside the main weather control one.
- There was also, during Claremont's run as writer, some rather strong subtext that she's bisexual.
- She also believes in a mysterious female deity referred to as "Goddess" or "Bright Lady", which makes her an adherent of a (probably fictional) minority religion.
- Nightcrawler: German (especially language-wise), Roma (by adoption) and a Catholic.
- Sunfire: Japanese and probably Shinto and/or Buddhist.
- Banshee: The original one an Irish Catholic, his daughter (formerly Siryn) also female.
- Kitty Pryde: Jewish and female.
- Rogue: A woman raised by a lesbian couple who also happens to be bilingual (English and French) since childhood.
- M (aka Monet St. Croix): A Muslim of French-Algerian parentage who's depicted as Ambiguously Brown. Her father is also generally depicted as a black man, making him a black Muslim.
- Sunspot: Brazilian (speaker of Portuguese), son of a black father and a white mother, Catholic.
- Magma: Depending on her origin of mixed Roman and Amerindian descent, also Palaeopagan.
- Jubilee: A Chinese-American woman of indeterminate religion.
- Psylocke: A white Englishwoman trapped in an Asian body.
- Gambit: Cajun, American Francophone, Catholic.
- Bishop: African-American, later retconned into being part Australian Aborigine.
- Eiman and Uriel, the Apocalypse Twins, are half-Egyptian and half-Japanese.
- Bling, one of the young Mutants trained at the Xavier Institute, is African American and bisexual. Her crush on Rogue was used as a plot point in one story.
- Indra, one of the Indian recruits, is a Jain, member of a small religious minority not just in America, but also in his native country.
- Magdelena Marie aka Veda from the Order is half German, half Mexican, as well as female. This is somewhat lampshaded with her dropping her last name (Neuntauben) for the media because people had trouble pronouncing it.
- If you want to get technical, "Calamity" James Wa is an Asian amputee and Sgt. Milo Fields is a black paraplegic, as well.
- Connor Hawke, one of DC's Green Arrows, is a mix of White, Black and Korean. Artists and colorists sometimes
have trouble don't bother reflecting this in his depiction.
- Mia Dearden, the current Speedy, is a Twofer: female and HIV positive.
- In the Bat-Family, Cassandra Cain is a Threefer: female, Asian, and has a learning disability due to her torturous childhood. The family also has Oracle (female, handicapped). Nightwing might count in the context of the Bats: not only is he Roma, but also relatively sane.
- Renee Montoya is the child of first-generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Afro-Latina, and a lesbian (So a threefer, maybe a fourfer if we are counting being female as a minority). This served as the focus of an award-winning arc in Gotham Central, which revolved around her involuntary outing, and as an ever-present factor in the background as she tried to make her way in the predominantly white, male Gotham City Police Department.
- She's also an honest cop in Gotham, which is a minority all its own...
- Katherine "Kate" Kane, the new Batwoman, is a Jewish lesbian with long (and complicated) history with Renee, which is ironic, considering that the original Batwoman and Batgirl were created in order to prove that Batman and Robin were not gay.
- Claremont's Gen13 run had a threefer - a wheelchair-bound black Muslim. Fourfer if you count his having superpowers.
- And the original Gen13 had the Apache lesbian Sarah Rainmaker.
- Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver from The Avengers are the children of a white Jewish father (Magneto) and a Roma mother.
- Wiccan from the Young Avengers is both Jewish and gay.
- His boyfriend Hulkling is a gay Kree-Skrull hybrid.
- Gay-Jewish-Mutant-Gypsy (from his sorta, "it's-a-long-story" mother, Scarlet Witch). Hmm.
- The Anarchist in X-Statix (at the time X-Force) hangs one of the most blatant lampshades of this trope in recent memory in the first issue: "I'm black, and I'm a mutant. That's like being black twice!"
- That said, of the 20+ members the team had throughout its existance, only two were heterosexual white-skinned males, and both of them were killed off within an issue of being introduced. All of the members were mutants, of course. The Anarchist was also adopted, though whether that should really count is questionable.
- When Judd Winick wrote Outsiders, the team rarely featured a member that wasn't visibly non-human or a minority: there's the aforementioned Roma Nightwing, adopted Navajo Arsenal, Japanese Katana, green-skinned Jade, blue-skinned robot Indigo, multi-colored Shift (a sort-of clone of Rex Mason, Metamorpho), and orange-skinned alien Starfire. He tops it off with Asian Amazon bisexual Grace Choi and black lesbian Thunder. A few boring white people eventually join the ranks, including Captain Marvel Jr. and Captain Boomerang, but they don't last.
- Kasper Cole from the Black Panther comic book series is the child of a white Jewish mother and an African American father. He ends up fathering a child with his Korean American girlfriend, who jokingly points out all the trouble the boy will likely end up having due to his unique heritage.
- Laura Dean, in Alpha Flight, is black, pre-pubescent, female, and autistic. Also, a mutant. (Not sure that one should count though, since it doesn't make her a minority either on the team or in the real world.)
- Alpha Flight was an outright freak show at times. Centennial was both black and old (the smallest minority in all of superherodom).
- The 2011 Teen Titans relaunch introduced Bunker, an openly-gay teenaged superhero from Mexico. He is the first gay member of the main Teen Titans branch.
- In the early 1990s, Archie Comics had the short-lived black girl Anita in a wheelchair.
- The second Marvel Comics Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau.
- Echo (formerly Ronin): Native American, Latina, female, and deaf. Also, a cross-dresser.
- X-Wing Series comics don't usually touch on this trope, but "Rogue Squadron 1/2", a short comic taking place just before the run on the Death Star, has four pilots from Red Squadron on a mission. These pilots are Wedge Antilles, Biggs Darklighter, Jek "Piggy" Porkins, and "Doc" Ceresi. Doc is a Twi'lek woman, though unusually stocky and androgynous compared to how Twi'lek women are usually drawn, and she's the one who pulls a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the comic. Everyone else is a human male. Everyone in Red Squadron, as seen in A New Hope, is human and male. Wedge's Gamble later tried to justify this, saying that the Rebellion, in the beginning, was almost entirely a human endeavor, with only a few nonhumans in until the movement started to get off the ground.
- And of course the Darklighter comic drew Doc as slinky, slender, and clinging to her human male wingmates, once again highlighting that one of these things is not like the others.
- Scandal Savage from the Secret Six is a biracial (half white, half Native Brazillian) lesbian.
- The time-travelling DC Comics hero Chronos
 (no, not the supervillain) is Walker Gabriel. He was adopted as a kid and didn't learn his background till years later, although he was obviously non-white. It turns out he's half-Chinese and half-ancient Mayan. His adoptive parents, incidentally, were also a mixed couple, his dad being white and his mother Asian. In the alternate timeline created when he saves his mother's life by erasing his own history, they adopt a little white girl, instead.
- Suki Leiber, the main character of the American manga Goofyfoot Gurl is half Japanese, half Jewish. Her whole group of True Companions is very multi-ethnic without being at all Anvilicious about it, since they live on the California coast where the Real Life population is pretty varied anyway.
- Sunfire from Judd Winick's run on Marvel's Exiles was a Japanese lesbian. She was also in an interracial relationship with an Alternate Universe version of Spider-Woman.
- In the 90's, DC introduced a character who was half-black, half-Vietnamese. Unfortunately, they named him Mongrel.
- New Warriors had Silhouette, who was half-black, half-Cambodian, female, and fought crime on crutches.
- In Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers, Shilo Norman (long established as the black Mr Miracle) is also Ambiguously Jewish.
- Ultimate Marvel has recently introduced Miles Morales, a half black, half Latino child, as the new Spider-Man.
Fanworks
- In the Glee fanfic Story of Three Boys, Puck mentions a few times that he suppressed his homosexuality more or less subconsciously for years, because it was bad enough that he was the poor, Jewish kid whose dad left.
Jokes
- There is an old joke about a Jew and a black man sitting next to each other on a plane. The Jew notices that the other guy is reading a newspaper in Yiddish and quips "Is being black not enough for you?".
- In Brazil, there is one where a black Jew is asked if he suffers, and he answers in Argentinian accent, "pibe, vos aún no sabes lo peooorr!" ("you don't know the worst part!).
Film
- The Family Stone had a deaf, gay son who was dating a black man.
- In the 2008 remake of The Women, Jada Pinkett Smith plays a black lesbian.
- The movie Chasing Amy includes the character Hooper X, a gay black comic writer posing as a militant black panther expy in order to sell more comics.
- Dr Joshua Strongbear Sweet in Atlantis: The Lost Empire is half African-American, half Arapaho.
- In Roger and Hammerstein's 1997 version of Cinderella, you have a female black for Cinderella (which may or may not count) and the Prince is Asian with a black mother and white father (a threefer).
- Taylor in High School Musical, black and female.
- In the movie Cherish, there's a character who is a Jewish gay dwarf who is also wheelchair bound. He points out at one point how he seems to be beaten with an unlucky stick.
- In Rising Sun, Tia Carrere (herself a twofer) plays a video footage analyst with mixed African-American and Japanese parentage and a withered hand since birth. She explains that this led to her being ostracized and labelled an outcast in her native Japan.
- Tomboy from Survival of the Dead is a Black Lesbian which makes her a three-fer.
- 15-year-old Leonardo in the Brazilian short film Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho (I Don't Want To Go Back Alone): blind and gay. He's refreshingly blasé about both matters.
Literature
- Dekka of Gone is a black lesbian. And a Moof, which makes her threefer in the novel's universe. She lampshades it.
Dekka: "I'm black and I'm lesbian, so believe me, there are always lines."
- Also, Edilio is Honduran and gay.
- In the novels universe, a lot of characters who represent only one token minority become twofers because they're moofs, such as Taylor, Dianna, and Little Pete,
- Susannah Dean of Stephen King's The Dark Tower is black, female, legless and has multiple personality disorder; notably, every other member of her ka-tet is a white male, except for Oy, who is a billy-bumbler (but Oy is male as well).
- Angua in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, at least in the first book. Later, other women (mostly dwarves) join the force.
- Played with because only one of her minority statuses is evident. For example, she says "Is this because I'm a w—" and gets cut off before you know she's actually trying to say "werewolf," not "woman."
- In Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, the main character has deliberately hired a twofer:
"Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled CAUCASIAN, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones—not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque."
- On the subject of Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash's protagonist (named, oddly enough, "Hiro Protagonist") is half black, half Asian. This is referenced multiple times throughout the novel, particularly when a patron of the white supremacist "New South Africa" asks which slur Hiro would prefer to be identified by.
- The Dresden Files gives us black Russian man Sanya. Possible threefer, given he's an agnostic Knight of the Cross. When asked about his past, Sanya noted that he had to be careful when visiting small towns, because he was such an oddity that he caused accidents when motorists took their eyes off the road to stare at him. Of course, this made him quite angry and resentful when he was a young man, which made him an ideal target for the temptations of the Denarians.
- Lampshaded by Reba in Red Dragon, the novel to which The Silence of the Lambs is the significantly better-known sequel. She herself is a blind woman who works for a photographic film processing company; she jokes that between her and another woman, the company managed to pack eight different minorities into two hires.
- Remnants was full of twofers, threefers and fourfers. The cast was ethnically diverse, most ended up orphaned, and some had mutations or physical abnormalities. Tate was a fivefer: a black female lesbian mutant orphan.
- John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy featured a female black lesbian naval Captain. Considering the series is about a naval taskforce from 2021 being sent back in time to 1942, it didn't end well for her.
- The female British captain with Pakistani heritage fared better, though it was an uphill battle. Is having two twofers itself a twofer?
- The two brothers from Holly Black's Valiant are Hispanic and African American.
- Frank Zhang from The Heroes of Olympus is Chinese/Canadian with Greek ancestry.
- Sammy is a Mexican-American mortal. That would make his grandson Leo be part-black, too.
- In Going Bovine, there's Gonzo, a hypochondriac Mexican dwarf who is later revealed to be gay.
- Nijinsky from BZRK by Michael Grant is Asian and gay.
- Holly Black's Modern Faerie trilogy gives us Luis, who is black and gay.
- The Mediochre Q Seth Series takes this Up to Eleven with Melz, who is old, disabled, female, blind, deaf and technically a witch when you think about it.
- In the Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices series, Magnus Bane is biracial (part Asian) and a self-proclaimed "freewheeling bisexual." And a warlock to boot.
[[folder:Live Action TV]]
- Wade/Unique from Glee is black and transgender.
- Also, Rachel's dads are gay and Jewish.
- And one of them is black.
- And Santana is a Latina lesbian.
- Big Time Rush has Kelly who is black and a woman (and also the Only Sane Man, if you count that)
- 'Celebrity Big Brother Australia', had Anthony Mundine, an Aboriginal Muslim.
- Thanks to racial blind-casting in Grey's Anatomy , Dr. Cristina Yang is Korean, Jewish-turned-atheist, and dyslexic. The explanation is that her Korean mother married a Jewish man after Cristina was born and thus the whole family converted. Now if ONLY the TV show could've been less afraid of showing gay people...
- Cristina is also the academic equivalent of a Twofer - a PhD-MD.
- Callie Torres, the resident Latina, is a lesbian at the moment, making her a threefer.
- She's definitely been confirmed as bisexual (although it was admittedly sudden and out of nowhere).
- As of season nine, we now have Arizona Robbins: lesbian and amputee.
- Probably the most notable and obvious example is Uhura from Star Trek, who was black and female (and was almost the only recurring character with either of these characteristics).
- Hikaru Sulu has both Japanese and Filipino racial origins, intended to represent all of Asia to the audience.
- Actually, Sulu was intended to be of solely Japanese origin. It was only when the producers found out Sulu wasn't a Japanese name they changed his origin to Japanese/Filipino.
- Hoshi on Star Trek: Enterprise (Asian and female).
- Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation (black and blind).
- He was originally going to be gay as well.
- Another old example is Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, a Puerto Rican Jew.
- Carter from Spin City (black and gay). Lampshaded in an episode where Carter refers to him
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