Twofer Token Minority - Television Tropes & Idioms

"[My employer] had to shape up their employment practices to keep this Defense contract. They managed to pick six women, two blacks, two chicanos, an oriental, a paraplegic and me into a total of eight hirings. We all count in at least two categories, you see."

Reba McClane (blind and female), Red Dragon

"The ideal quango appointee is a Black Welsh disabled woman trades unionist. We're all looking for one of them. You don't happen to know any one, do you?"

— Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes, Minister

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 or Asian). 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 black men.

Women are invariably treated as a "minority" for the purposes of building a "twofer", when in reality females make up a small majority in most developed industrial nations. However women still have a low-and-only-slowly-increasing participation in media, as a result of long-term social exclusion, So Yeah...

Examples

Anime

The thankfully-aborted SD Gundam adaptation for Western Audiences, Doozy Bots, would have had the black guy in a wheelchair. He would have turned into a "Doozy Bot" that ran on tractor treads.

Comic Books

Dr. Cecilia Reyes from X Men is a fourfer: black, Puerto Rican, female, and mutant, though it's X-Men so me might have to bump it down to threefer because of that last one..
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.
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.
Connor Hawke, son of DC's Green Arrow is a mix of White, Black and Korean. Artists and colorists sometimes have trouble 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.
- There's also Renee Montoya: female, Hispanic, and a lesbian.
  - And her recent love interest Kate Kane (Batwoman), who is a Jewish lesbian.
Claremont's Gen13 run had a threefer - a wheelchair-bound black Muslim. Fourfer if you count his having superpowers.
Wiccan from the Young Avengers is both Jewish and gay.
- His boyfriend Hulkling is a gay Kree-Skrull hybrid.
- Let me get this straight: His name is Wiccan and he is Jewish? He must have a hard time introducing himself at family meetings or religious services.
  - The name seems to have been a last minute effort, after someone realized that it would be a Bad Idea to have a gay male character called Asgardian
  - Wiccan is... special. In the head.
  - Wouldn't that make Wiccan a threefer?
And the Runaways have the couple of lesbian Majesdanian Karolina Dean and lesbian multitransexual (shapeshifter, sometimes male, but female for relationship purposes) dark-skinned Skrull Xavin.
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!"
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.
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)
In the early 1990s, Archie Comics had the short-lived African-American girl Anita in a wheelchair.

Film

The Family Stone had a deaf, gay son who was dating a black man. Or So I Heard.
In the 2008 remake of The Women, Jada Pinkett Smith plays a black lesbian. Or So I Also Heard.

Literature

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."
Chaka, among others in the Whateley Universe. Chaka is a black female bisexual formerly-male mutant. Is there such a thing as a fivefer? (Pretty much everyone in Poe Cottage at Whateley Academy is automatically a twofer or threefer, since they're all mutants and all LGBTI, and about half of them are female.)
- And she's 'running up the walls' hyperactive. Sixfer?
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."
The Dresden Files gives us black Russian man Sanya. Possible threefer, given he's an Agnostic knight of God.
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.

Live Action TV

Thanks to racial blind-casting in Greys Anatomy , Dr. Cristina Yang is Korean, Jewish-turned-atheist, and dyslexic. (This troper hopes "Yang" is an actual Korean last name, because she KNOWS its a Chinese one.) 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 Ph D-MD.
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 Japaneseand Filipino racial orgins, intended to represent all of Asia to the audience.
- Hoshi on Star Trek Enterprise (Asian and female).
- Geordi LaForge on Star Trek The Next Generation (black and blind).
- It should at least be noted that Star Trek always has a multi-ethnic cast featuring at least one alien. Deep Space Nine had five alien main character, two of which were white females.
- Voyager had B'Elanna Torres, who was female, Latina, and half-Klingon.
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 himself as a minority and a character sarcastically remarks "What do you mean, a "minority"? You're black and you're gay. You cover up two thirds of the Earth's surface. You're like water."
Marianne Jean-Baptiste's character on Without A Trace (black and female).
Lisa Gay Hamilton on The Practice (black and female).
- Just so we're clear, we're talking about a show whose main cast, initially, was the aforementioned black female, an overweight white woman, a black guy, a white woman, a skinny white woman, and one staunchly Catholic, impliedly Irish white guy, shortly joined by an chubby Italian guy?
Lt. Van Buren on Law And Order (black and female). This is lampshaded in one episode, where she notes that people probably think she got the job (as police lieutenant, not actress in a hit legal drama) for diversity reasons.
Cambridge on Pie In The Sky (black and female) — may not count, since the series has multiple female recurring characters, but worth mentioning because she's a Twofer Token Minority in-story, picked by her Pointy Haired Boss as an efficient way of demonstrating his equal-opportunity-employer credentials.
Marissa on Early Edition takes this one step further: She's black, female, and blind.
Toshiko Sato would count on most shows, being Asian and apparently bisexual, but in Torchwood, the latter actually puts her in the majority.
Djaq on the current BBC Robin Hood, female and Arab.
Stevie from Malcolm In The Middle lampshades this, noting that as a black man in a wheelchair, he can get pretty much any job he wants because people love to have a two-in-one minority member around.
Det Kima Greggs from The Wire is a fourfer (female, black/Korean mixed-race lesbian). Omar Little is a black gay man; his boyfriends have been Jewish, Hispanic and black. Their status as Twofer Token Minorities is debatable, however—the cast of The Wire is at least two thirds black, and neither character was tokenized.
James Spurlock from 30 Rock is actually called "Toofer" because as one character says "with him you get a two-for-one; he's a black guy and a Harvard guy."
- The cast actually calls him Toofer so often that some of them cannot even remember his real name.
- While his nickname comes from his race and education, functionally speaking he's a Twofer because he's black and (usually) sane - which is definitely a minority on the TGS staff.
- This is Lampshaded in a later episode. Floyd interviews for a high-level job; Jack thinks he's a shoo-in until they see that the other candidate for the job is a handicapped black man. "You're not beating that."
"Original Cindy" from Dark Angel is a black lesbian.
Willow from Buffy, who describes herself in Season 8 (the comic) as a "gay Wiccan Jewess."
Anthony on Designing Women is the only regular who is either black or male (all the other regulars are white women).
In one episode of Sit Com Rachel Gunn, R.N the main characters were debating how only the white Male Doctor wasn't a minority or discriminated against. There were two female nurses, a native American nurse and a black orderly. The final member was a black nun who when filling out a form had to tick "Other: explain"
Lampshaded in The Young Ones in which comedian Arnold Brown is accused of being 'Scottish and Jewish - two stereotypes for the price of one'.
House has Thirteen, who is a bisexual woman with a fatal illness. Briefly, there was a black Mormon who looked like he might have stuck around, but they already had Foreman and apparently Jewish Wilson is enough on the religious side. They manage to cram an awful lot of diversity into a very small cast.
- Yeah, they do. Taub is Jewish too, while Cuddy seems to have some Jewish roots. Kutner is Indian, though he was brought up by an American family. Chase is an Australian of Czech descent. House and Cameron are atheists.
The American version of The Office, whose humor largely consists of Steve Carell accidentally insulting minorities, has Oscar, who is both gay and Mexican.
The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody had a particularly Anvilicious episode about diversity involving a black man in a wheelchair.

Video Games

Woozie Mu in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is a blind Asian. Not so much tokenism, as being necessary for the jokes.
Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2 is a woman of black and Asian descent... which would make her a three-fer.
- But remember, she isn't too black (or Asian for that matter). Her dad, Eli, fits this better. Or fitted. *weeps*
The Demoman of Team Fortress 2 calls himself a "a black Scottish cyclops", and laments that there're more CENSOREDCENSORECENSORED that the like of him. He's not anctual cyclops—he has one remaining eye; he wasn't born with only one eye in the middle of his face. But that would be awesome.

Western Animation

Foxxy Love on Drawn Together is also a threefer: black, female, and bisexual (though it appears Everyone Is Bi according to the Rule Of Funny.
Elisa Maza from Gargoyles; female, black, Native American, and human, in a cast that is overwhelmingly none of these. Fourfer FTW!
When Dale on King Of The Hill is being opposed for Gun Club President, he states that his opponent has "already got the black vote — Earl — and the gay vote — Earl."
Asian Reporter Tricia Takanawa on Family Guy. (Asian and female) But that is, of course, part of the point. Same with Blaccuweather Forecaster Ollie Williams, who for his hilarious delivery is quite a fan-favorite.
Supposedly Alexis in Transformers Armada is Vietnamese. However, it's never mentioned anywhere but a writer interview and she looks pretty dang white, so it might not count.
Toph, blind female, sure. But does being an Asian in an All-Asian world count? Is she a minority whenever she's outside the Earth Kingdom? Well, she's a twofer, at least.
- I'm pretty sure that being female in Avatar definitely doesn't make you a minority - at least, after season one.

Real Life

The members of freak folk duo Cocorosie definitely qualify as French Jewish lesbians, making them threefers.
- Fourfers. They're part-Native American.
Condoleezza Rice—black, female, rumoured to be gay. Or So I Heard. Even if the third one isn't true, though, throw in her being a neoconservative politician and you have a very rare gem indeed.
- The Bush administration in fact had more ethnic minorities than any other in history.
  - I suppose we can draw our own conclusions from that fact.
Stand-up comedian Margaret Cho is an American-born Korean female Fag Hag/bisexual, making her a threefer (by her own standards, at least; Your Mileage May Vary).
CNN reporter Soledad O'Brien: female, black, Hispanic.
Comedian Stephen K. Amos, black and gay.
Much of the discussion around who Barack Obama might nominate to the Supreme Court has centred on such twofers as Sonia Sottomayor (female and Hispanic) and Kathleen Sullivan (female and gay).
Current Australian Federal Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penelope "Penny" Ying-yen Wong, Asian lesbian.
This Troper herself is an Asian female in a pretty much mostly white community surrounded daily by more males then females. (That being said, this Troper doesn't beleive she's seen a black person in a while due to the extreme whiteness).