Not Tropeworthy: Ethnicity Obscuring Mutation

Interviews with Monster Girls Vampires always have fair skin and blond hair and iris. This is why Hikari's father dyes his hair blond; it is to avoid doubts about Hikari's parentage out of this trope.

• Ethnicity Obscuring Mutation: Jinx is Indian but people, even other Indians, don't usually notice this because of her gothic style and her grey skin color (though she does have racial features).
• Ethnicity Obscuring Mutation: Jinx mentions that she was ostracized growing up due to being born with grey skin and pink her. Her Indian father all-but abandoned her as a child.
• Manhunter (DC Comics) Mr. Bones has translucent skin, which makes him resemble a skeleton in a suit. When he puts on makeup in order to talk with Kate Spencer in public, she's shocked to discover that he's actually a black man.
• Avengers Academy Mettle is black (and Jewish), but resembles a giant red robot with a Skull for a Head, and so he frequently gets mistaken for the Red Skull, a Nazi supervillain, much to his chagrin.
• The Venture Brothers The Guild: The Monarch guessed from the surname "Ong" that Wide Wale was Asian-American. Wale says his real family name is Welsh, suggesting he's Caucasian, but you can't tell with how whale-like he became.
  • The Venture Bros. has White Noise, a white supremacist who, after a freak TV repair accident, became living static. Monarch is incredulous that White Noise refuses to be part of a gang that allows people of color considering no one can even tell he's actually white.
• Legion 2017 Cary Loudermilk was born to Native American parents, but appears to be white, to the point that when he was born, his father assumed that his mother had an affair. However, it turns out this was a result of his mutation, which meant he shared a body with his sister Kerry, who does have a Native appearance.
• Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime): Homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist are people brought Back from the Dead (or close replicas thereof). After an initial monstrous phase, they look nearly identical to the deceased, but most will be Eerie Pale Skinned Brunettes regardless of their original hair or skin tone. This concealed that Lust was based on a brown-haired, dark-skinned Ishvalan woman—specifically the lover of Scar's brother.
• Glow Worm in Astro City is a glowing green worm man with energy projection powers. It turns out he was African-American before the accident that caused his transformation. He is not happy when a comic book publisher implies that he is a white supremacist whose crimes are driven by racism.
• Early in her career, the modern, Pakistani-American Ms Marvel used her newfound morphing abilities to pose as the original Ms. Marvel, who is white. She later abandoned this disguise because it became impractical when the actual Carol Danvers was now a more public figure, but the fact that she was able to do this means that during Outlawed, when she became wanted by the police, the cops declined to set up a dragnet for every South-Asian teenager in Jersey, because they couldn't be sure that Ms. Marvel wouldn't just use her powers to hide her ethnicity.
• One story in Love Romances involves a middle-aged Ambiguously Brown couple who get suckered into having their consciousnesses downloaded into robot bodies. It turns out that the robot bodies only come in a set range of appearances, so they both end up looking more Caucasian.
• In V for Vendetta, Codename V was left horribly disfigured as a result of the hormone experiments, and then they became even more disfigured when they blew up Larkhill and got caught in the flames. And the few records of V's life before Larkhill have long since disappeared. As Eric Finch notes, there is no way to determine V's race or even gender. Subverted in the finale, when the original V dies and Evey Hammond takes over their identity.
• In Captain America: The First Avenger, the Red Skull mentions that he no longer fits Hitler's criteria for racial purity because his transformation into a man with red skin and a skull-like countenance makes it hard for him to prove that he is white.
• The alien signal on Threshold has about a 50/50 chance of either turning its victims into super powered alien agents or killing them. If it kills them, it causes their corpses to undergo a disfiguring (and painful) transformation. In one episode, Nigel is able to have one such victim transferred to their lab for autopsy by claiming she's an Orthodox Jew. At the lab, he comments that for once, the disfigurement worked in their favor because she was actually Chinese.
• The Joker suggests he might be black in Injustice For All, saying to Batman, "You never met me before the bleach".

Batman: But all the public beatings... I'll need the entire Justice League coverup fund.

• Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers features a war between two subspecies of an insectoid race, with black being good and white being evil. A member of the former race was born an albino, so they sent him to infiltrate the enemy.

• Tales to Behold Burst Lion is a white girl with auburn hair in her normal form, but has blue hair and red and yellow fur in her cat form.
• Section P same as above
• Strange Tales of the DA Multiverse same as above
• X-Statix: Venus Dee Milo is black, but her mutation has turned her into a cloud of energy, forcing her to wear a suit which obscures her ethnicity.
• X Men Deadly Genesis Darwin's skin is grey like that of classic "grey" aliens, making it impossible to discern by looking at him what his ethnicity is. He's afro-latino, for the record.
• Comic Book/Muties Ankhi. a Swedish girl who is shown to have been white with black hair before her mutation, becomes bald and has pitch-black skin after the mutation kicks in.
• X-Men: Xavier Institute Her diamond skin makes it difficult to notice that she's African-American.
• X-Men: Marauders Since he can't return from crystal to human form, his ethnicity is unknown.
• X-Men: 2000s Members: His beak and chicken features obscure that he's actually caucasian.
• New X Men Academy X He's from India, but his skin and hair color tend to distract from his actual nationality.
• New X Men Academy X He is Italian, but aside from his name there is no way to tell this.
• Earth Twenty Seven DEO His powers makes it difficult to notice what his enthnicity is.

/Earth 27: A.R.G.U.S. and Task Force X He was born as an african-american man, but turning into a humanoid crocodile makes it very difficult to notice now.

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) Quasimodo is either half-Roma or full-Roma. Unlike most of the Roma (or even his mother), he's light skinned and has red hair.
• In The Atomics, the Slug has a slug-like physiology that obscures the fact that she is a black woman.
• Sparx, a friend and ally of Superboy, has electric powers which have made her hair so filled with electricity that it looks like it's made of it, and her body and eyes are a glowing and stark white even though she's naturally a tan Caucasian girl with curly brown hair.
• Ben Grimm and Sharon Ventura, both members of the Fantastic Four, were mutated into bulky, rock-like forms as a result of exposure to cosmic rays, obscuring the fact that they are both white and, in Grimm's case, Jewish.
• Black Lightning's daughter Jennifer, who goes by Lightning, inherited a form of her father's powers that eventually has her body turn into lighting, almost completely disguising her African American heritage.
• In the New 52 version of Teen Titans, Solstice is an Indian girl who was mutated into charcoal-black creature with glowing eyes and Throat Light. The series also introduced Skitter, a black girl who developed an insect-like body.
• In Secret Warriors, Pod is a Finnish girl named Aikku Jokinen who became fused with a sentient alien suit that she was unable to take off for fear of killing the suit. Eventually, the suit ejected her, but left her with undersuit. For added obscuring, Aikku is a lesbian, but the suit effectively prevented from having sex and made it very hard for her to date.
• Beast Boy from Teen Titans is completely green, from his skin to his hair. He was originally a blond-haired white boy, however he was turned green in the same incident that gave him his powers.

Kroll from Star Trek Beyond is a black man, but when the crew meets him for the first time, they can't even identify him as human because of the mutation-inducing technology he uses to extend his life. Whateley Universe:

• Basically any large amount of what is termed "Gross Structural Dystrophy" could lead to this. Cerulea's mutation turned her coloration into variants of blue, so her original ethnicity as a white American is utterly obscured.

Fubar underwent some transformation due to Cthulhu Mythos influence, turning a normal mutant human into some semi-aquatic being. Blot, who absorbs all energy, and therefore just looks like a black humanoid shape, as there's no light to show any of his features.

• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ambiguously Brown Raina undergoes terrigenesis, causing her skin to turn grey and scaly and her curly hair to be replaced with quill-like growths.
• In El Goonish Shive, when Grace is in her part squirrel form it is not apparent that her human heritage is non-white due to the brown fur. Even in human form she comes across as Ambiguously Brown with brown hair.
• In God of War Kratos is much paler than your typical Greek due to the curse laid upon him by the Gods of Olympus after he killed his wife and daughter in a rage.
• Ebon from Static Shock has been mutated by the Big Bang into a creature of pure shadow and darkness, and is pitch black for most of his appearance. Prior to the Big Bang, he was an African American teenager, but this isn't immediately visible due to him being just a man-shaped mass of shadow. When he is de-powered in the series finale, he bears a striking resemblance to his brother Adam, the Rubberband Man.
• Steven Universe: Lars is half Filipino; after dying and getting revived, his orange skin and hair are permanently bleached pink, making him resemble a Gem more than a human.
• While her Indian ethnicity is still clear in the comics, the Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go! version of Jinx (as mentioned in the page quote), has grey skin and pink hair.
• Fallout: New Vegas: According to a developer blog post, the companion Lily Bowen is of African descent. Not that you can tell now that she's a muscle-bound Nightkin with blue skin and a Guttural Growler voice.
• Freddy Krueger, the antagonist of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, is Caucasian, but it is difficult to discern his ethnicity due to his severe burns.

• FreakAngels All of the Freakangels are born with pale skin and purple eyes. While most of them are white anyway, Caz made their connection the most obvious since she's black.
• Arknights Others Abyssal Hunters are not only under the risk of mutating into a sea monster, they are also potentially capable of mutating their surroundings as well, which happens at the end of their lives. Their physiology also differ enough compared to normal Aegir folks that they can't even be considered as Aegir anymore and their race is listed as Undisclosed instead.
• Invoked in a joke where a kindergarten teacher in the Deep South has had enough of her white students refusing to sit next to black students, so she tells them finger paint blue stripes on their faces and says that from now own, there are no longer whites or blacks in her class: only blues. Then she tells the light blues to sit next to the dark blues.
• Subverted in Watchmen (2019) - Even after Cal Abar reverts to being Doctor Manhattan and regains his glowing blue skin, he still has African-American features (i.e. those of the man's who's identity he took, Calvin Abar, not those of the man he was born as, Jon Osterman, who was white), and thus his adopted kids immediately recognize him.

• Teen Titans (2003) Jinx is Indian but has an Ethnicity Obscuring Mutation. This is because she's an Indian woman in the original comics.
• Exiles (2018) attempted to avert this trope, giving pink-skinned Blink noticeably black facial features to reflect the fact that she has black Bahamian heritage. This led to some controversy with the fandom, many of whom had long believed that Blink was Caucasian and accused the artist of Race Lifting her for the sake of "political correctness".
• This frequently pops up in Teen Titans fanfics involving Jinx. Jinx is grey-skinned but the comic character she's based off is Indian. Fan Wank is that Jinx is still of Indian descent in the cartoon adaptation, but her metahuman genetics gave her grey skin, abnormal eyes, and pink hair.
• In Warhammer 40,000, the Salamanders chapter of Space Marines are black-skinned. Depending on the Writer, this means they're black as in of African descent and facial features, or black as in of various ethnicities but with charcoal-black skin (and glowing red eyes).

• Electric Slide is modeled in the image of a Disco-age black woman. This isn't apparent at first, since her decaying skin is now green. all zombies are green, but this one alone has an afro- if anything, isn't this the rare zombie which does have a clear race?
  • same link listed on Electric Black Guy
• Race Tropes: this link suggests it has to be a change rather than a born in mutation
• Inverted with the heroic Skrulls Xavin and Crusader, who take on the forms of black men to obscure the fact that they're aliens. why is this more relevant than the many examples of aliens appearing as white humans?
• Played for Laughs in an episode of Sealab 2021, where Quinn is Re Tooled into a snake-like symbiote creature, which the director claims was done because the writers were having trouble scripting an "urban" character. unclear if they mean a mutation or literally a retcon