I've restored most of the material and put up a discussion topic here
in Trope Repair Shop.
I think we need to decide whether or not characters trying to "pass" and undergoing a Pass Fail should be included here. For one thing, these are characters that are specifically meant to be those who look like people who aren't mixed race. Another thing, we do have Pass Fail.
Then again, that doesn't leave us with a lot.
>> The body of the description is pretty well written but even admits that there's no such thing as "what a mixed-race person should look like," rendering this trope meaningless, and the examples are nonstop Completely Missing The Point of that <<
That's basically what I came to this discussion to say, only to find that it was already said a couple of years ago. I think it's still a problem and maybe should just be deleted altogether.
You've got the trope description that admits that mixed race person could appear to be anywhere on the spectrum of those races, including appearing to be at either end. But then the examples often say something like "obviously not mixed race" which there is no such thing as.
>> I don't even want to get into "Barack Obama is half white but everybody acts like he's just black" <<
That's actually a good reason for this trope being wrong. If Barack Obama had a movie made about him way in the future, and Obama was played by a black man, would that be a trope? No, it would just be (so long as the actor looked reasonably like him) believable. Jason Kidd and Barack Obama are both of the same mixed-race, but they look like a black guy and a white guy.
>> or the notion that the races of the royal family in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella were supposed to be taken literally. >>
Do we have a trope for that? It's not quite Black Vikings because that occurs when a characters race is X but the actor is Y. In that version of Cinderella, IIRC, there's no mention of what the actual characters race is or what nationality they are or anything else of the like.
Watch out where you step, or we'll be afoot.
>> You've got the trope description that admits that mixed race person could appear to be anywhere on the spectrum of those races, including appearing to be at either end. But then the examples often say something like "obviously not mixed race" which there is no such thing as. <<
Possibly this trope should be shifted more towards neutral "Dubious Mixed Race"? With a possible split retaining this title, for cases like Billy Jack, where the story acts like the person should be obviously mixed as complete strangers are identifying the person as a race they don't look like? (Though it might be best to make that a subtrope of Informed Attribute, since functionally it is.)
Edited by AnoSa
Apparently this page has been erased and restored before and I can see why. The body of the description is pretty well written but even admits that there's no such thing as "what a mixed-race person should look like," rendering this trope meaningless, and the examples are nonstop Completely Missing The Point of that — people complaining that characters don't "look" mixed, and I don't even want to get into "Barack Obama is half white but everybody acts like he's just black" or "I object to 'lily-white' because it has connotations of effeminacy" (really?) or the notion that the races of the royal family in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella were supposed to be taken literally. If we're going to have a trope along these lines, the nearest thing I can think of is the times when an actor of one race is cast as another by the logic that he looks like he "could" be (Do We Have This One?). But what we have here is just borderline racist gibberish. You all need to do some reading.
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