Tragic Mulatto: Difference between revisions

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** What the racial markers for Britannian-ness are is deeply mysterious. The most Asian-looking guy in the show is a high-ranking Britannian nobleman, Guilford, and one Britannian Purist is a particularly dark-skinned woman.
* Kotaro from ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' mentions briefly that this is his background as a half-Human half-[[Youkai]]. Being forced to do dangerous works since a child to be able to survive, since no one would take him.
* ''[[Skip Beat (Manga)|Skip Beat]]'' has recently officially broken into this with chapter 184, which opens with a flashback to young {{spoiler|Hizuri Kuon, later known as Tsuruga Ren}} being told even God must find his existence problematic, being a Japanese, Russian, and 'American' cross, and then ramps it up to 'damned unfamiliar' and then'' 'not even human'''. Which, given he spent almost his entire childhood ''in America'' probably says more about the issues the Japanese have with the concept of ''minzoku'' than anything else.<ref>Among other things, they are so attached to the idea of being a nation with only one race-group and therefore no racism problems that they didn't acknowledge the existence of the Ainu until they'd colonized them to the edge of extinction, Okinawans are never going to be recognized as ethnically distinct despite the stereotype of dark skin and the fact that the islands have their own traditional language, even if these days they mostly speak Japananese...the Korean minority also had their citizenship revoked back in '45, so they don't count.</ref>
** Repeat, this is in ''California'', given his Dad's a Hollywood legend. Absurdly beautiful and improbably Asian features combined with a beautiful head of blond hair on a sharp, multi-talented kid with a lot of energy, and where in America outside of maybe Stormfront are you going to find anyone responding with anything by envy? But apparently this race-mixing was an actual problem for him. In California. In the nineties.
*** The guy then called him an 'ugly mutant' and it seems to have been calculated to offend, but given it was addressed to a teen who ought to know better and still left such a deep impression we're bothering with two pages of flashbacks, I'm thinking we can add this trope to {{spoiler|Ren's}} pile of issues.
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== Comics ==
* Namor the [[Sub -Mariner]]'s cousin Namorita, of ''[[The New Warriors]]''. She had major angst over being half Atlantean and half Human. She's also has the [[Cloning Blues]] on top of that.
* Some versions of Aquaman have also had this problem; i.e. when he's half-human. Man doesn't even have a consistent first name, and he's been retconned so many times he's hit [[Mutliple Choice Past]] territory.
* The [[Cloning Blues]] version of Superboy, Conner, turned out to have this problem. Although since the human genetic donor was retconned into being ''[[Lex Luthor]]'', there were much better things to worry about than mere race.
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* ''Imitation Of Life'', both versions, but emphasized heavily in the Douglas Sirk version.
* The classic British film ''Sapphire'' concerns the murder of a mixed-race girl who had been passing for white and hoping to marry a white guy.
* Senator John Ambrose Fauntroy in [[CSA: Confederate States of America]] is finally [[Driven to Suicide]] when it is suspected he has black blood. But he was a [[Complete Monster]] in life, and it's revealed {{spoiler|after his death that he was 100% Caucasian. His black slave made up that rumor to get revenge on his master. It's [[An Aesop]] that racism harms the perpetrators as well as the victims.}}
* Dutch movie Sonny Boy (2011) is an example of this set in [[WW 2]].
* The film ''[[Australia]]'' explores the plight of half-Aboriginal children.
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* In Ellery Queen's novel ''The Roman Hat Mystery'', this is the murderer's motive. {{spoiler|He was passing for white, and the victim threatened to expose him. The detective, instead of criticizing racism at the end, says something along the lines of "Well, we all know they're more violent anyway." Yuck.}}
* This turns out to hide in the backstory of Faulkner's ''Absalom, Absalom!'' Well, more like Tragic Octoroon, actually. One drop is still too much.
* The setting of [[Robin McKinley]]'s novel ''[[Sunshine (Literaturenovel)|Sunshine]]'' includes the fantasy version of these, with emphasis on passing for all part-demons. Miscegenation is illegal, so if passing fails you just blame it on a dead ancestor no one told you about till now, register as partblood, and cope with severe prejudice the rest of your life. Mentioned are:
** Middle-aged bank manager suddenly grew horns; was fired. Appealed and won, because that's illegal, but they still fired him.
** Decent sort of jock suddenly got tusks. They kicked him off the team and took away all his awards because he must have had an unfair advantage. And his whole family was guaranteed off the fast track to anything.
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*** Also used deliberately by Kirk in an earlier episode, "What Are Little Girls Made Of", as a [[Something He Would Never Say]] clue to raise Spock's suspicions.
** In the 2009 movie, he gets in a particularly note-worthy barb after some racist comments by a Vulcan on his maternal heritage, throwing it back in their faces by (unprecedentedly) rejecting their acceptance of his application for a coveted position. He points out their perfect Vulcan acceptance record stands intact, as by their own definition, [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?|he is not a Vulcan, but a half-Human]].
** Played very straight in ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' with B'lanna Torres, who denies her Klingon heritage because she believes her father left their family because of it. The children of the human colony she lived on tormented her, and Klingons meeting her would refer to her as a 'mongrel'. When she became pregnant, she attempted to genetically alter her child to remove all traces of Klingon DNA because she believed the child would suffer for it as she did.
** Also played straight with [[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine|Tora Ziyal]], the half-Bajoran daughter of Dukat, shunned on Cardassia and Bajor; the only place she ever truly found a home (other than at her father's side briefly) was the titular station.
** But averted with [[Star Trek: theThe Next Generation|Deanna Troi]], who was embraced by both her parent cultures. It helps when neither comes from a [[Rubber Forehead Aliens]] species.
* Sherman Alexie's character Zits in ''[[Flight (Literaturenovel)|Flight]]''.
* Doyle in ''[[Angel (TV)|Angel]]'', who manages to really screw his life up this way. Given he's introduced as a shady, alcoholic failure of a gambler and conman, it is fascinating to discover that five years ago he was a stable, successful ''kindergarten teacher'' called by his first name, Francis, who'd met his fiancee while they were volunteering at a soup kitchen. Then the demon blood showed... He did it to himself, though. He could have kept everything, even the hot fiancee, he just freaked out and bolted.
 
 
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons (Tabletop Game)|Dungeons and Dragons]]'': Depending on the campaign and the individual in question, [[Half-Human Hybrid|half-races]] in D&D are either shunned by both sides of their heritage or they end up becoming liasons between the two.
** The two most common half-races--Half-Elves and Half-Orcs--respectively play up the positive and negative aspects of being mixed. In general, Half-Elves are seen as beautiful and socially accepted by both sides (if a little condescended by full elves), while Half-Orcs are considered brutes by humans and weaklings by full orcs...and are often products of [[Child Byby Rape|war atrocities]].
 
 
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* The Branded in [[Fire Emblem Tellius (Video Game)|Fire Emblem]], while theoretically [[Half-Human Hybrid|Half Human Hybrids]], share more than a passing resemblance to this.
 
 
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== [[Real Life]] ==
* The very famous Brazilian writer [[Machado De Assis (Creator)|Machado Dede Assis]] was a victim of this. It fueled his angst and feelings of displacement, and is probably one of the reasons why he even decided to write in the first place.
* Bob Marley was allegedly this in his childhood, having a black mother and a white father. That changed quite a bit when he became Jamaica's most famous (and one of the richest) citizens ever though.
* Many first-generation mixed children even in America today can suffer a lot over it one way and another, not so much in public contexts as in questions of identity, extended families that object to one another strenuously, and things like people refusing to believe they're actually related to their white parent when they're *clearly* black.