Basic Trope: A person from a group that has been marginalized wherever they live travels back in time and experiences prejudice.
- Straight: Alice, a Black woman from a country where Black people were historically enslaved and women were denied economic opportunity, travels to a time where slavery is legal and experiences racism and sexism.
- Exaggerated:
- Every White person in the past becomes filled with Unstoppable Rage at the mere sight of a Black person and every man is openly appalled that a woman dares walk about alone.
- Alice isn't just Black, she's also left-handed, a lesbian or trixic nonbinary, intersex, amputee, has autism and schizophrenia. Naturally, she finds herself treated like absolute dirt in an era dominated by right-handed, heterosexual, cisgender, bodily-abled, neurotypical White men.
- A Five-Token Band travel to an era where prejudice is rampant, and all of them experience extreme forms of racism/sexism/ableism/homophobia/transphobia/etc. EXCEPT for the White Male Lead or Token White man who is promptly treated like a god by the local populace.
- Downplayed:
- People in the past are prejudiced and do feel uncomfortable around Alice, but don't go out and say it because they want to be polite.
- Alice is a lesbian who travels to The '80s, where she has conceal her sexuality from the Moral Guardians, yet she still suffers a good deal more homophobia than she might in the 21st century.
- Alice is a Jewish woman without Phenotype Stereotype who travels to the Nazi Germany era, and although she can hide her own heritage from The Gestapo, she is still uncomfortable with prejudicial atmosphere around her.
- Justified:
- Deliberate Values Dissonance
- Anyone who wasn't a straight, male, White Anglophone Protestant during most of the United States' history will very likely experience all sorts of prejudice and unfair treatment.
- Inverted:
- Alice, a Black woman from The Roaring '20s, travels forward in the future, and is quite shocked when she discovers a future (FAR into the future, still not our times) virtually devoid of prejudice of any kind.
- A person travels forward in time and experiences prejudices that don't exist yet (such as eye color, hair color, arm length, or pet preference).
- Bob, a White man, travels into the future and finds that now he is the member of the marginalized group. Or he travels to some point in the past, in a country and period when White people wouldn't be welcome — Sakoku-era Japan, for example.
- Bob, a breathtakingly virulent racist, manages to travel to the far future that has become a multiracial utopia and reinfects it with his hatred. He then tells the horrified protagonists that his creed is immortal.
- Subverted: Alice walks down the street and gets a dirty look from a White person … who is only shocked at her futuristic clothes, or her nakedness, as the case may be.
- Double Subverted: The White person who meets Alice says, "Ah, you're from the future? Is that what [insert plural racial slur here] wear in the future?"
- Parodied:
- Bob, a man from the future, travels back to the present. He is accepted in his own time but is a punching bag in our time.
- Alice goes so far back in time, and is so bad at fitting in when she gets there, that she accidentally invents racism and sexism.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice is Ambiguously Brown. Depending on the time period, location, and how she's dressed, she faces greater or lesser amounts of prejudice. Sometimes it's her extremely White colleague Bob who can't fit in.
- The conceptions of culture, race, ethnicity, and what is considered significant change with time and location. Essentially everyone rolls the dice, as being privileged today is no guarantee that they won't face heavy prejudice in the past over subdivisions that were long forgotten.
- Averted: Alice travels back in time, but nobody is racist or sexist towards her.
- Enforced: "We can't send a Black woman into the 1800s without having her experience racism and sexism. It wouldn't be realistic!"
- Lampshaded: Alice is chased by an angry mob of racists. "Oh, yeah. I'm in The '50s."
- Invoked: Alice, a Black time-traveling cop, is pursuing Bob, a White time-traveling criminal. Bob accuses Alice of being an escaped slave, leading to her capture and his escape.
- Exploited: Alice, a Black time-traveling cop, is pursuing Bob, a White time-traveling criminal. Bob escapes while a mob of racists attacks Alice.
- Defied:
- Alice refuses to go back in time to periods when racism or sexism are still dominant.
- Only Voluntary Shapeshifters may use time travel, since they can physically morph to avoid persecution in any time or place they might wind up in.
- Discussed: Alice wants to go back in time, but her White colleagues Adam, Betty, and Bob discourage it because she is Black and might experience racism.
- Conversed: Cathy and Chris are watching a Show Within a Show. Cathy says, "Why would they send Alice back in time? She's Black and racism might hinder her work."
- Implied: Alice mentions getting dirty looks when she traveled back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which Bob can't understand at first.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice can't stay long where she was supposed to be sent, for fear of death or grievous bodily harm.
- Due to the limitations on the potential customer base arising from the society's history of bigotry, few people can indulge in Time Travel for Fun and Profit, deepening extant inequities.
- Reconstructed:
- She goes to a place, time, or both where she would meet more enlightened people.
- Every time-traveling agent has a list of places and times where they cannot go due to their race, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, et cetera. Alice can safely go places where her White colleague Bob would be lynched just as he can go places where she would face that peril.
- Few people can travel back in time, but everybody can travel forward in time to a more enlightened era, learn what is expected to happen in the future, and change the present to come into line with the future.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice incurs Amusing Injuries after her pursuers catch her and give her a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
- Alice gets fed up with the racism of the past and beats the crap out of every bigoted mob member who gets in her way.
- People from the past insult Alice in ways she finds laughable.
- Played for Drama:
- A few especially violent bigots from the past maim or kill Alice.
- Alice went back in time to correct an injustice done to one or many people in the past, but because she'll be treated as a second-class citizen at best in that era, she will suffer for it.
- Played for Horror:
- Alice isn't attacked physically, but a few especially sadistic bigots from the past show her what they've done to other Black time travelers, which scares the bejabbers out of her for days on end.
- Alice gets a Cruel and Unusual Death.
- After suffering something horrible from the past bigots, Alice becomes a time-travelling Serial Killer targeting bigots throughout history.
- The bigots steal Alice's time travel device and decide to satisfy their bloodlust by lynching people from the groups they hate throughout history.
- Untwisted: Alice is treated well in the past, leading to the appearance of Politically Correct History. She then discovers her Chameleon Suit doesn't just give her the appearance of period-appropriate clothing but makes her appear the "correct race".
"Return to No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel … And watch out for those filthy time-traveling n(BLEEP)! Goddammit! They let anyone jump in time nowadays…"
