Her Child, but Not His



"''"Old Aunt Susie just came back With the child and the child is black.""

- Cole Porter

""Prince Chid is my son... What? My genes are just recessive, that's all. All of them.""

- The Duke of Fried

Two parents, who are the same race or species, are having a child. Except when the child is born, it visibly does not resemble either of the parents.

Usually implies adultery on the woman's part. Even before DNA testing, this can resolve the question of Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. If she's the main character, expect her to either have been raped, or not know why she had a child that doesn't look like its father. In very old stories, the theory of "maternal impression" may be used to explained it—either seriously, or as a way of bamboozling the putative father.

The most well-known subtype of this is a white couple that gives birth to a black child. The title comes from a scene in the movie Life where the (white) warden of an all-black prison sees his illegitimate grandson for the first time, and is revolted to see that the kid is ethnically mixed. However, this trope can also be played for laughs when the father has no idea the kid isn't his when it's clear to everyone else.

As these are sure to be Three-Month-Old Newborns, expect the race to be completely obvious from birth, even though a black newborn's skin tone usually takes a while to darken.

In Real Life if the parents are purely white the children will be white, making it justified to doubt her faithfulness but if the parent are of mixed race, then their hidden recessive genes can come out to the point of having a fair child. Sometimes the infant's parents are of different races, while sometimes both parents are themselves mixed race. However, the old wives' tale of a white parent and a light-skinned black parent (possibly passing as white) giving birth to a dark-skinned baby is extremely improbable in real life, due to the genetics involved.

Compare Oblivious Adoption, which tends to be more innocent, and Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, where the man isn't sure whether he's the father. If it's not a plot point, it's likely Hollywood Genetics at work.

Subtrope of Your Cheating Heart. See also Cheating with the Milkman.

Advertising

 * The Klondike commercial "Who's Your Daddy?"

Anime and Manga

 * Vision of Escaflowne has a variation of this: while Prince Chid is supposedly the son of an interracial couple between Marlene and the Duke of Fried, even complete strangers pick up on the fact that the very Anglo-Saxon Chid has no physical resemblance to the father..
 * According to the Abridged Series Duke of Fried, however, his genes just happen to be recessive. All of them.
 * Becomes a recurring plot point in Gosick . The birth of their child and.

Comic Books

 * In an issue of Titans, Red Panzer reveals that he's ashamed of his dark skin, because he was raised by a die-hard Nazi father. At first, his father suspected that his wife had been unfaithful. The truth, which Red Panzer thought was worse, was that his mother had black ancestors.
 * Averted in the case of Marvel super villains the Mandrill and Nekra. The former was a black child born to white parents, while the latter was a white child born to black parents, but this was due to nuclear genetic tampering and not infidelity. That didn't prevent them from being outcasts from their families and from society in general.
 * After The (not so) pious Helene (by Wilhelm Busch) marries rich fat guy Schmöck (whose name doesn't coincidentally sound like shmuck), she bears twins who look very much like her lover (and cousin) Franz.

Fan Works

 * In Running With The Wind, Book One: A Living Lie, a Warrior Cats fanfiction, Squirrelflight has been cheating on her mate Brambleclaw with his blue-eyed half-brother, Hawkfrost. When she has kittens, one of them has blue eyes. However, this indicates some artistic license as ALL kittens have blue eyes at birth, and it takes them at least six months for them to turn a different color. Even then, just blue eyes shouldn't be a clear indicator, nor can fur color. A litter of three kittens can have three different-colored pairs of eyes and three different pelts. Cats are also superfecund: any given litter can have more than one father.

Film

 * In Me Myself and Irene, Jim Carrey's character Charlie Bailygates goes into denial when his wife gives birth to black triplets. Only gets more funny as the boys grow up and becoming stereotypical (albeit genius) big, black men. And he's just a scrawny white dude. Nonetheless he and his "sons" love each other dearly.
 * Done in The Brothers Solomon where we are led to believe that one of the brother's sperm was used to impregnate the surrogate mother but as it turns out the baby was actually her black boyfriend's, but they were so clueless they didn't care.
 * In Angelitos Negros, an old Mexican movie, a white couple has a little girl... and she looks black. I don't remember the details very well, but the wife accuses the husband of being of black ancestry and is going to leave but... cue revelation. The black woman whom she thought to be her nanny was in fact her mother. After lots of melodrama the woman realizes what a dick she has been the whole film to her family and they all have a happy ending.
 * The Naked Gun 33 1/3 had this at the very end of the movie, where Frank's wife gives birth to a black baby...or so it appears. As Frank is chasing his black partner Nordburg through the hospital, it turns out they were in the wrong delivery room, and the chief comes out of a separate room with Frank's actual wife and child (But judging from Nordburg's reaction, it seems they had an affair anyway. Cue OJ Simpson joke)
 * In the 1994 Drew Barrymore film Boys on the Side, Drew's character finds out she's pregnant while on the run for killing her abusive boyfriend. Her new Cop Boyfriend has fallen in love with her and is there when the baby is born...a black baby, from her cheating on her then-boyfriend.
 * In an recent Russian movie, roughly translated into English as "Stop Fooling Around", this trope is invoked with a white Siberian couple having a black son. It is immediately explained, though, that the mother's father was an American WWII sailor, resulting in a black grandson.
 * In the Ron Howard film Parenthood, ne'er do well son Tom Hulce comes home and his family is shocked—shocked! -- to see his son Cool, because he's Black.
 * Bait-and-switched in The Constant Gardener. The protagonist's wife has an ambiguous relationship with her black coworker throughout the film, and after she goes into labour we see her nursing a black baby.
 * Parodied (but of course!) in Scary Movie 4, where Brenda gets with the Amish guy from not-The Village, and in the Where Are They Now? Epilogue, is shown giving birth to a baby that is very obviously sired by
 * In Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, a white King played by the guy who designed the Titanic, and his queen Constantina who is played by Whoopi Goldberg manage to have Prince Christopher, who is... Asian!
 * Happens in Barney's Version with his first wife Clara: Barney marries her because she's pregnant even though they don't really love each other. When the baby is stillborn, the doctor asks who the father was, and when Barney replies it was his child, he says "then you must be...an albino."
 * Hilariously subverted in Due Date. Ethan continuously hints at his suspicions of Peter's wife cheating on him with his Black Best Friend, Darryl. Towards the end of the film, Peter walks into a delivery room and stares in horror at a newborn black baby; thankfully, he just walked in the wrong room.
 * In the second Jurassic Park movie, Ian Malcolm has a daughter whose strong African features and very dark skin make it improbable at best that Jeff Goldblum fathered her. This is, however, never discussed in the movie.
 * Although her mother is never seen either. It's entirely possible she is the black parent. It's also never stated that the girl is his biological child.
 * The movie Life takes place in an all-Black prison camp in Mississippi from the 1930s to 1997. In the 40's, an attractive young man joins the camp and exchanges some significant looks with the (white) Superintendent's daughter, Mae Rose. Nine months later, she has a very obviously not white child and the superintendent makes all the inmates line up so he can compare features and find out who "violated" his daughter. Before he gets to the culprit, the other men all claim to have fathered the baby to protect the real father.
 * In Stilyagi, the father of Polly's son John is not Mel, but a nameless visiting black man from America.
 * In Superman Returns Superman is upset to learn that Lois Lane has had a son with her fiance. Then the kid starts tossing furniture around.
 * A rare fatherless version, in Secrets and Lies the mother finally meets the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was 15, she is very surprised to see that she is black. At first she is sure it is a mistake as she would have remembered sleeping with a black man, then she does figure it out, she had assumed her white boyfriend was the father.

Jokes
"Son: Father, you and Mom are white, but I am black. Why is that so? Father: Son, that was such a wild time, just be happy you don't bark."
 * There is a joke about a this that manages to up the ante.


 * A white baby can also serve as the punchline if both of the putative parents are Chinese.
 * Mr. Wong (to his wife): No, no, no! Two Wongs don't make a White!

Literature

 * Arthurian legends, collected and written into a novel by Chretien De Troyes, explain that Sir Yvain has a half-brother from a previous marriage when his own father took a dark-skinned Moor as a wife in Spain. Demonstrating just how shockingly little provincial Europeans knew about genetics when interacting with people from other races... Yvain's brother has checkerboard-colored skin, with alternating light and dark patches. (Ironically, such things have been known to happen in real life, with mosaicism and genes that are only partially expressed, but they are extremely rare, and in any case it is clear that these northern Europeans who had rarely seen a Moor except on the battlefield honestly believed that this would be the result of a mixed coupling).
 * In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor has been having an affair with Empress Tamara, and her child is black. Tamara's adult sons attempt to kill the child, but Aaron stops them, shocked that they would kill their own (half) brother. Of course, Aaron then casually kills the midwife to make sure no one knows what happens, and plans to just tell the emperor that it wa stillborn. This enters into a curious moment of humanizing the villain, because while Tamara and her sons, and Aaron in particular, are thoroughly evil and manipulative people, Aaron then gives a long speech about how he will care for and raise his firstborn son. In contrast, Titus killed one of his own sons simply for speaking out against the emperor. Who was the real villain? Establishes that this trope is Older Than Television.
 * Used in one of the Outlander books in which Claire saves a white (also possibly married) woman's abandoned child. As a doctor, she's able to identify (despite the child being recently born) that the father was black, and strongly suspects it might have been why the child was abandoned, the setting of the novel being the mid-18th century.
 * In the short story "Désirée's Baby" by Kate Chopin, a foundling girl who appears to be white marries, and has a baby who's obviously mixed.
 * Variant in A Song of Ice and Fire: King Robert Baratheon has black hair. Queen Cersei is blonde. All three of their children are blonde. It's explained that every other time Robert sired a child (illegitimately), the child had black hair, leading to the discovery that the royal kids aren't his.
 * The Conqueror books do this with eye colours - Chagatai, Ogedai, and Tolui all have the same golden eyes as their father, Genghis Khan, but Jochi, the eldest brother, has brown eyes. The fact that Borte fell pregnant with him around the time of her kidnapping doesn't help matters, and Chagatai takes great pleasure in telling everybody that Jochi is a 'Tartar bastard'.
 * In A.B. Guthrie's novel The Big Sky, Boone's wife gives birth to a red-headed baby, which makes him think she cheated on him with his red-haired friend. In a rage he kills his friend, beats up and abandons his wife, and goes back home to Kentucky...
 * In Passing, Nella Larson's exploration of black women who engage in or resist passing themselves off as white, the fear passing women have of giving birth to children who could not pass comes up in conversation.
 * In The Sacrifice of Tamar, Tamar's grandchild is born with dark skin. Her Orthodox Jewish son is filled with righteous wrath, believing his wife cheated on him; the daughter-in-law can only cry and deny it. Then Tamar confesses to her son that he was conceived when she was raped by a black man. She never told anyone, because she had made love to her husband that same night and always hoped the baby was his.
 * Warrior Cats: Even before it was revealed that Jayfeather, Hollyleaf, and Lionblaze are, basically everyone already knew it. None of them look anything like Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw, except for the eye color of both Squirrelflight and Hollyleaf. Squirrelflight is a ginger cat with green eyes. Brambleclaw is a brown cat with amber eyes. Jayfeather is a gray cat with blue eyes, Hollyleaf is a black cat with green eyes, and Lionblaze is a golden brown cat with amber eyes.
 * There are also Oakheart and Crookedstar. They're both brown, and
 * In Family Tree by Barbara Delinsky, Clair, the wife of a man, Hugh, from a very upper-crust white family gives birth to a son daughter that has caramel skin. The husband's family (except the grandmother) immediately disowns the child and the husband accuses the wife of cheating and leaves her for a short time, even though a DNA test proves that he is the father and a lie detector test proves that the wife never cheated . It turns out that
 * In explaining the Redheaded Stepchild idea (literally), the backstory of The Prisoner of Zenda also falls into this trope. In the 18th century, The prince of Ruritania visited England and met the beautiful wife of a certain English nobleman. The two men fought a duel, the prince leaving the country with serious wounds and the Englishman later dying of a chill. Some months later, the wife gave birth to a red-headed child and it wasn't much of a mystery who his real father was. Thus, it's been an embarrassment to their family since then whenever someone is born with red hair.
 * Wicked: Elphaba's green skin is a testament to her father not being her mother's husband (although in this case potions, rather than genetics, are to blame).
 * A rare example of a central character intentionally cheating on her (white) husband with a man of a different race comes from Andrea Levy's most popular novel, Small Island. Also notable in that
 * The original Forrest Gump novel ended with Jenny giving birth to one of these, lying to Forrest that it's his, and he's stupid enough to believe it. In the film the son is white and obviously Forrest's.
 * The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" has a widow who remarries and then keeps sneaking off to a cottage and won't tell her husband why. He naturally suspects her of having an affair, but it turns out that what she never told him was that her first husband was black (American); the resident of the cottage is their daughter, who she'd told him was also dead. Leads to a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming by the standards of the times when the second husband accepts the child immediately, and a Crowning Moment of Funny in that Holmes didn't come close to guessing that one.
 * Jewel in As I Lay Dying is red-haired and noticeably taller than his father and brothers. It's revealed that he was the lovechild of his mother and the local minister.
 * In the book Waiting For June the white character is pregnant and everyone assumes her best friend, who is black, is the father, especially when the baby comes out black but it turns out that the father.
 * In the ancient Greek story Aethiopica, King Hydaspes and Queen Persinna of Ethiopia cast out their infant daughter Chariclea because she is white. After many adventures, it is revealed that she is, in fact, the perfect image of a picture of Andromeda that her mother had been looking at while she conceive, and so Chariclea really is their daughter with "maternal impression" explaining her looks.
 * In the book version of The Help its revealed that  Years later, the child returns and completely upsets people when they realise the truth.

Live-Action TV
"Terri: If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell anyone? Kendra: Oh my god. Is the baby black?"
 * Inverted with How I Met Your Mother. Barney's mother never married, and is implied to have been fairly... outgoing in her fertile years, resulting in Barney being white and his half-brother, James, being black. When Mrs. Stinson gives her two sons a name, "Sam," and an address, the two brothers naturally go on a quest to meet one of their fathers. When they meet Sam,
 * On My Name Is Earl, Joy's second child, Earl Jr., was black, despite Joy and Earl both being white (Joy's first child, Dodge, was conceived before they met so he was always treated as not being Earl's biological son). Earl was too shocked at first to really get upset and Joy tried to explain that Earl might have had a "repressed Black gene" in his lineage from his great-grandmother. Earl doesn't really believe it, and asks the doctor to confirm his suspicions (which the doctor does, in no uncertain terms.)
 * A later episode had Joy explain to her parents that Earl Jr. was 'reverse albinism' "You know how two black people can have an albino child..."
 * The trope was then sent up in the cliffhanger of the final episode, when
 * On Desperate Housewives, the Hispanic couple Gabby and Carlos had their Asian maid as a surrogate, but the baby turned out to be black. It turned out there had been an embryo mix up and the child wasn't related to them at all.
 * Played realistically on an episode of ER where Benton delivers a teenage girl's baby. The grandparents suspected that the father might be black and are relieved to see a white baby, but Benton warns the girl that it's not so obvious at first.
 * It eventually devolves into a fairly transparent ploy to keep the pure-white baby from his horrible racist grandparents.
 * On Sophie, the titular character is devastated when her boyfriend Rick leaves her for her best friend Melissa, especially since Sophie is pregnant with what they all thought was Rick's baby. It turns out Rick wasn't the only one cheating when Sophie gives birth to a black baby. The father is a black man named Andre whom Sophie had a one night stand with.
 * In the Season 8 Law & Order episode "Blood", a baby is given up for adoption by her parents because . Whew.
 * A bit for You Fail Biology Forever here—while two mixed-race parents can definitely have a baby darker than either of them, the new wife here was Swedish.
 * Referenced in an Ashes to Ashes episode—a suspect's alibi rests on his having been there when the police came to break up the domestic dispute resulting from one of these.
 * Done on Deep Space Nine where Gul Dukat (modified with future surgery to look, and pretending to be, Bajoran) leads a Pah-Wraith cult, which includes a pregnant woman and her husband. She gives birth to an obviously half-Cardassian baby, and everyone believes Dukat when he says it's a miracle...at least, until they find out he doesn't intend to commit suicide with the rest of them.
 * The Cold Case episode "Libertyville" plays with this trope as the victim is a black man passing for white who marries a white woman and has a daughter. However, this is not why he was killed. The daughter has white features. She and her mother meet their black relatives during the Medley Exit.
 * Done implicitly due to actor selection in Power Rangers Mystic Force. Udonna, who looks Irish, has a son with Leanbow, who looks Spanish. The kid, Bowen, looks Arabian, with skin about eight shades darker than either of theirs- a shade fairly close to that of his parents' close friend Daggeron. No comment is made on this matter.
 * Waynetta Slob in Harry Enfield and Chums feels that she's failing to keep up with the other families in the neighbourhood as she lacks a 'Brown Baby'. So Wayne steals one for her.
 * Not exactly. Waynetta takes out a separation. Wayne then gets a black girlfriend (played by Naomi Campbell), who gives birth to a brown baby that the Slobs adopts after getting back together. In short, it's a very rare gender reversal example of this trope!
 * Nip/Tuck: Christian assumes that the baby Gina is carrying is his. Big shock when the baby is born and he is black. Very black.
 * Inverted in Glee - In the first episode, Caucasian Rachel has two dads, one white, one black. She doesn't know which is her genetic father. Once we actually meet them, though, we find they're both white.
 * Also referenced when seemingly pregnant, white Terri talks to her sister.

""You've been sleeping with Carl!... after the Rams game?!... He's covered in WOOL you HARLOT!!!""
 * Probably an Actor Allusion—the actress who plays Terri also played Gina in the Nip/Tuck example above and both shows were created by Ryan Murphy.
 * Invoked on Whose Line Is It Anyway? - one game involves enacting generic soap-opera scenes, but as Funny Animals, and one session specifically invokes this trope, describing the child of a bull (Brad Sherwood) and a cow (Ryan Stiles) as "something unexpected". Colin Mochrie, saddled with this role, squeezes out from between Ryan's thighs... and baas.


 * In the Lifetime series Any Day Now, main character Renee had an aunt who was half-white and had married a white man. In the present day, Renee had to meet up with her cousin and the man's wife was shown as a little taken aback to see this lily-white man and black woman being cousins.
 * Invoked in Californication. One of Hank's one-night stands insists he got her pregnant right up until the baby is born...which is when she (finally) remembers having sex with a hot black Starbucks barista around the same time as her dalliance with Hank.
 * In the series 2 finale of Sea Change, Trudi gives birth to a Vietnamese baby, after everyone had spent half a year thinking that the father was Jack, who is white. This winds up being better, because Jack is the ex-husband of Trudi's sister, and it sidesteps the squickiness of Jack's children having a half-sibling who is also their cousin.
 * In an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob becomes convinced that their baby, Richie, somehow became switched with someone else's baby at the hospital. He contacts the other people and invites them to their house to discuss the issue. When they come in, they're a black couple with a black kid ... and they think it's pretty funny.
 * So did the audience; they laughed so long and hard that the normally single-take scenes featured a very noticeable cut where the audience's reaction suddenly drops off. They tried re-shooting, but once the big reveal was out, the follow-ups just weren't as significant.
 * In the US version of Shameless Liam Gallaghar is a very dark skinned baby. Everyone assumes that the mother had sex with a black man during one of her drunken episodes. Frank Gallaghar treats the baby with the same care (or lack of) as his other children and it's never an issue for anyone. When tests are finally done
 * Subverted in the second series final of Kath and Kim. When Kim's baby, who none of the main cast have seen yet, is brought in, she's Indian. Cue flashback to seven episodes earlier when Kim tried to seduce an Indian waiter the night she got back together with Brett. Then a nurse comes in and apologizes for the mix-up.
 * Done on Blue Heelers. The woman, a high school teacher, claims that her baby is a result of recessive genes, as her grandmother was Maori. Neither her husband, the hospital staff or the police are fooled, and it's soon confirmed that she's been having an affair with an Aboriginal student.
 * On Sisters, Teddy's (yes, female) fiance Dr. Sorenson has an ex-girlfriend who is pregnant with "his" baby. When the baby comes out, it's part-Asian. Dr. Sorenson is relieved, and doesn't hold a grudge.
 * In the miniseries adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, society wife DeDe has cheated on her husband, Beauchamp, with a Chinese grocery boy—and gotten pregnant. Though she goes to great lengths to keep the secret, she breaks down and confesses to a friend during a visit to an art gallery that she's got good reason to fear that the betrayal will be obvious once everyone sees the baby. The friend assumes this means the baby will be brown, but DeDe, increasingly upset, says no, it won't be brown. When the friend asks what color the baby will be, DeDe, now too upset to speak, points at a nearby painting—a solid yellow canvas.
 * A recurring sketch on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In involved the fabulous Farkle Family — a huge family of rhymingly named red-headed, glasses-wearing children belonging to the dark-haired Fanny Farkel and her oblivious, equally dark-haired husband Frank (Jo Anne Worley and Dan Rowan). The entire family is introduced to visitors one after another along with their trusted friend and neighbor, the red-headed, glasses-wearing Fred (Dick Martin), who complements Frank on his "fine-looking family." Played for Laughs in that Frank clearly never suspected Fanny of dallying with Ferd.
 * On The Practice, a woman was accused of murdering her husband. Her neighbor alibied her, and she was acquitted. This trope comes in because
 * One episode of Too Cute focused on a family of Siberians: proud white and gray-furred parents Maksim and Solomeya... and their litter of black-and-white kittens, whom the narrator notes look more like the handsome black tom next door.
 * On Switched at Birth, one of the main characters is abandoned by her father in her early childhood because of this trope—the Latina mother can't explain to the Latino father why they have a pale-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed baby. (It turns out that she was, of course, switched at birth with another baby, who grows up dark and busty in a houseful of pale, waifish redheads. Her parents explained away her strange coloring as a sudden recurrence of the family's Italian heritage.)
 * A variation in Roots. When Kunta Kinte finds Fanta as an adult, she refuses to have sex with him since she is her master's bedmate and any children she has have to be brown (indicating that they are the product of a mixed race couple.)
 * In Game of Thrones, Robert Baratheon’s wife cheats on him. Robert Baratheon doesn’t realize this. His King’s Hand Jon Arryn catches on and sends a letter saying “the seed is strong”.

Reality TV

 * Apparently Truth in Television: An episode of Maury featured a white woman who cheated on her (also white) husband with a black man, had his baby, and passed it off as her husband's. The boy was clearly mixed-race, but her husband was fully convinced he his son and was devastated by the obvious DNA test results. You kind of feel sorry for the guy when he breaks down crying, even if you can't help but wonder how this got past him in the first place.
 * There was another episode where two white parents had very two dark skinned, black, children. Since the woman had cheated around the time of their pregnancy they were afraid that they were both unsure of the father. However it turns out her husband was their father, as the segment ends with Maury telling the audience how not everything is what it seems.

Music

 * Harry Belafonte's song "Man Smart (Women Smarter)" contains a mini-story about a Jamaican man who goes with his wife to the hospital, but when the baby is born, its eyes are blue - meaning it's not his child.
 * The song by Mecano Hijo de la Luna tells the sad story of a gypsy woman who prays to the moon for a husband. The moon says she will have a gypsy husband, but that she must sacrifice her firstborn child to the moon. When the child is born, it is entirely white, like an albino - not olive-colored like either of its parents. The father thinks he has been tricked, and stabs his wife to death, and abandons the baby on the hillside. The moon happily adopts the baby.
 * The narrator of The Who's "Substitute": "I look all white, but my dad was black".
 * In Ray Stevens' "Fred", the title dog (whom Ray treats as a human friend) brings home a female dog who is pregnant. In the final verse, Fred gets hit by a car just before the female dog gives birth. Ray then remarks, "Now old Fred's gone and I'm kinda glad / 'Cause if he were here now he'd sure be mad / 'Cause ain't one of them pups looks anything like him."

Radio

 * This American Life did a story about a mixed-race guy who had been born to a white girl who got pregnant in high school; there was a shotgun wedding with her white boyfriend, and she was the only one who knew that there was another boy at school who was a candidate for paternity, and that he was black. The marriage lasted, more kids were born, they grew up, and everything was normal except that for years and years no one acknowledged the increasingly obvious fact that the oldest child was of a different ethnic makeup than everyone else in his family.

Theatre

 * An old Venezuelan play, Salto Atras, plays with this: The baby from the marriage between a very white upper-class girl and her very white and German husband is born dark-skinned. The girl swears that she didn't commit adultery, so her stiff and comically bigoted parents try to dispose of the baby and find a whiter one to replace him before her husband finds out, while they try to discover if there are any "dark secrets" in the family tree who can explain their prerogative. They couldn't made the switcharoo, but when the husband meets the baby his woman birthed he is delighted. Turns out that his grandmother was a Sassy Black Woman from the coastal town of Barlovento who was imported to Germany by his Grandfather out of love, so the baby reminded him of the mulatto relatives his in-laws hasn't met yet.
 * Shakespeare uses this one in Titus Andronicus, in which the empress Tamora gives birth to a black child, the son of Magnificent Bastard Aaron the Moor rather than Tamora's husband Saturninus. Tamora's sons (by her first husband) want the baby killed, but Aaron prevents them from doing so. Protecting the baby is the only decent thing Aaron does the entire play.
 * In one production of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the adult bear costumes were brown, but Baby Bear's costume was white. When Papa Bear asked, "Who's been sleeping in my bed?", a man in the audience said, "Well might he ask."

Video Games

 * Dagram Thaurissan and Moira Bronzebeard will have one in World of Warcraft.
 * Can happen in The Sims 2 (responsible for The Strangerhood above) even if you've ensured the skin color of both parents, supervised the.... conception... and played that family to full term. It's a bug, of course, but still damned funny.
 * Another possible cause is user-made custom skintones that have been modified to abide by the game's genetics system but were assigned weird values.

Web Animation

 * This occurs at the end of The Strangerhood for
 * The Cyanide & Happiness YouTube account has this video.

Web Comics

 * In one of the Something*Positive 1930s strips (this one, to be exact), where black midwife Hetty is delivering a white girl's illegitimate baby, and the girl's parents freak out when it's a black child, blaming her for "getting the black all over that baby" when she delivered it. As she replied: "Woman, I pull 'em out. I don't put 'em in."
 * In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, Abel is revealed to be an extreme complicated version of this in his side comic. Specifically, Abel is born with wings, something that is not at all unheard of in the setting but is unsual and indicates that his parents couldn't really have had them. Him and his mom recive large amounts of flack over this from just about everyone but the father who steadfastly belives that she was faithful. As part of The Reveal Abel finds out that
 * It's also heavily insinuated that this is the case with Devin, since his father took one look at him and walked out the door. This has naturally led to rampant speculation among fans.
 * A sort-of example in Vinci and Arty; Vinci is a raccoon. His parents are chihuahuas. Arty assumes Vinci must have been adopted, but it turns out both his parents had "recessive raccoon genes" from further back, so Vinci is "a pureblooded raccoon, but I could have registered as a pureblooded chihuahua".
 * Implied in The Kenny Chronicles with Death Golden, her parents are baboons and she's a lemming. Her name comes from the heart attack she gave her "dad".
 * Pre-empted in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip.
 * Guinness from Krakow
 * Very...odd example in Dueling Analogs here.
 * In this case, it's because Samus is part Metroid. The bigger question is: what is she doing with Mega Man?
 * In Pokémon-X, it's indicated that
 * Justified in Schlock Mercenary with the backstory of Dr. Edward Bunnigus. Because her parents were of questionable breeding and intelligence, eugenics laws mandated that they have genetically-tailored children instead of natural. As a result, their daughter is black, but they don't seem to mind.

Web Original

 * A certain forum's Let's Play of Oregon Trail contained an adulterous woman who tells her husband that their son isn't black, he just has Melanism. It turns out

Western Animation
""I must be an Indian! That explains why I like tobacco so much! And hate the federal government so much!""
 * Done as a gag in the Warner Bros cartoon Porky's Poppa (1938), where Porky, "delivering" swaddled bottles of milk from a cow, discreetly overlooks the chocolate one.
 * Joseph Gribble on King of the Hill, who has obvious Native American features despite supposedly white parents. His "father" Dale, usually an overly-suspicious nut, is completely oblivious to the fact that his wife has been cheating with her "massage therapist" John Redcorn for the majority of their marriage. Everyone except Dale and Joseph know it. When Peggy learns of the affair (one of the last people to do so, told by Hank, who'd up to this point assumed she'd been aware all along but, like everyone else, was keeping quiet), she mentions Nancy claiming that Dale's grandmother was Jamaican.
 * His conspiracy theorizing eventually kicked in for his son, so now he "knows" that his son is...an alien!!!
 * On another occasion, he finally realizes that Joseph looks different, and has a psychic dream where he sees an Indian man having sex with Nancy. His conclusion?


 * In the Disney cartoon "Ugly Duckling", the duckling's father accuses the mother of cheating. After a short fight, they separate.
 * A Robot Chicken sketch featured the Potato Heads in the delivery room. She gave birth to a carrot. After an awkward moment of silence, Mr. Potato Head looks at her, horrified, and spouts "You... whore!"
 * A particularly warped version turns up on Family Guy, in which Brian is thought to have impregnated Carter Pewterschmidt's prize-winning greyhound—but when the puppies are born, they all look like Ted Turner. TBS and Adult Swim syndicate Family Guy.
 * Though, to be fair, when the episode first aired, they were not yet syndicated, and Turner was already in the midst of the arguments that would lead to his 2003 ouster from the network management. So maybe more Hilarious in Hindsight.
 * Similarly, an episode of South Park has the boys trying to crossbreed Cartman's pig with Kyle's elephant so they'll get pig-sized elephants. When the pig finally gives birth... "Hey. It kinda looks like Mr. Garrison."
 * In Batman Beyond Mary and Warren McGinnis, both redheads, have two black-haired sons. A popular fan theory is that this is the reason for their divorce. An odd example, because while he is the father, "Epilogue," an episode of Justice League Unlimited, reveals that.
 * It should be noted that this actually wasn't even intended—the creators eventually realized how implausible the family was and performed an Author's Saving Throw.
 * Mumble from Happy Feet not only was born without the ability to sing like the other penguins (it's the main reason he tap-dances instead), but was also born with Blue Eyes, something real penguins do not have (even his own parents both have Brown Eyes).
 * Vaguely implied in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Cup Cake (earth pony) gives birth to a unicorn and a pegasus. Her husband Carrot Cake (also earth pony) gives an explanation involving far-back genetics and a relative who isn't even related by blood. Once he finishes the explanation he gives the audience a nervous Aside Glance and says, "That makes sense, right?"
 * In The Amazing World of Gumball Margret Robinsin switches the names of 2 babies. The fathers see the babies and the names they have and then proceed to fight (implying they came to this conclusion).

Real Life
"This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children-& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think."
 * The subject of an old joke: "You have the mailman's eyes."
 * The inverse often comes up on talk shows, where a black or part-black man will insist a light-skinned child can't be his. Usually, he'll get a reminder that this isn't the case, especially right after birth.
 * This 2002 news story tells of a mix-up at an IVF clinic that resulted in a white couple receiving black twins - Switched Before Birth?
 * As a real life example, there have been incidents in which couples have given birth to twins: one white, one black.
 * A less-innocent example here; both the mother's husband's sperm and the sperm of an ethnically-African man were used in the in-vitro fertilization. The likely cause was accidental contamination.
 * If one or both parents are mixed-race, the chances of this occurring are rather common.
 * However, since it's recessive, if one parent has the gene for Albinism regardless of race, the chances are 1 in 4 for a child with this condition if the other parent has the gene as well.
 * A famous example is Sandra Laing—the "Black Afrikaner"—who was the natural daughter of two conservative white Afrikaner parents in Apartheid South Africa.
 * There's a historical anecdote about a white upper class woman who lived in West India in the 17th century. She gave birth to a black child that died shortly after birth - people put the blame on her drinking too much chocolate during her pregnancy. Nobody ever suspected that the black male slave serving the chocolate to her bedroom might have had something to do with it.
 * Or the paternity was the Elephant in the Living Room, and the baby's death wasn't due to natural causes.
 * An inversion of the typical setup: a British Nigerian couple gave birth to a white, blue eyed baby girl.
 * There was a special on cheaters on Discovery Health channel and there was a Chinese-American woman who was married to a Chinese-American man. However, they had trouble having children. She began having an affair with a black man and her husband did not find out until she had a dark skinned baby.
 * Mary Chestnut, a Southern woman, kept a diary during the American Civil War. One of the things it's most remembered for is a comment on the situation of slave owners raping their female slaves and fathering children with them (who of course would become slaves themselves):


 * Noted footwear designer Christian Louboutin initially assumed that he was adopted according to a 2012 interview, feeling that he didn't blend well with the rest of his family who was "very French". Because of this, he made up his own backstory based on Egyptian culture as he was into the pharaohs. In an ironic twist, one of his sisters revealed in a 2014 interview that his biological father was indeed Egyptian, whom his mother had a secret affair with.