Twofer Token Minority

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"He's a diversity double-whammy!"


[My employer] had to shape up their employment practices to keep this Defense contract. They managed to pack six women, two blacks, two chicanos, an oriental, a paraplegic and me into a total of eight hirings. We all count in at least two categories, you see.
Reba McClane (blind and female), Red Dragon
"Now let me introduce to you my team: Disabled Ethnic, Teenage Poofter, and Woman. Don't talk to them, they're just here to tick boxes."

Called a "twofer" by media analysts. A cast member or show participant which represents two Token Minority groups at once. More stark when most other participants on a show are white males.

Many news broadcasting teams have a white male, and a female minority member (usually black, Asian, or brown (often of Hispanic heritage)). This allows them to have a diverse appearing team even though the number of people on their crew is small. This "twofer" is a practice that is common in the industry, and is commonly criticized by media watchdogs and minority interest groups. In particular, the complaint that comes up frequently is that it limits the roles and jobs available to men of color.

Of course, women are not actually a minority in terms of numbers, but count as such in media because of the long history of their being marginalized.

Note: Obviously, this trope is not limited to combining just "two" Token Minority groups.

Examples of Twofer Token Minority include:


Anime & Manga

  • Bleach has Kaname Tosen. He's black and he's blind. What more do you need?
  • Simon from Durarara!! is a black Russian who sells sushi.*
  • Nathan Seymore (Fire Emblem) from Tiger and Bunny who is a gay black man.
  • Atsuko Jackson from Michiko to Hatchin is presumably half-black and half-Japanese.


Comic Books

  • Dr. Cecilia Reyes from X-Men is a "threefer": an Afro-Puerto Rican female (technically a "fourfer" once you remember she is a mutant).
    • Along similar lines, Armando Munoz AKA Darwin is also Afro-Latino.
  • And let's not forget Ororo Munroe, aka. Storm. At one point in the comics, another character actually points out that she seems to have an even mix of African, Asian, and Caucasian features.
    • The somewhat mysterious origin of the Asian/"Asian" component to her features (which are completely atypical for the African community she comes from, and seemingly unique only to her and her maternal ancestors) is actually a plot point at various times.
    • The original intent was that her unusual appearance was a minor cosmetic mutation alongside the main weather control one.
    • There was also, during Claremont's run as writer, some rather strong subtext that she's bisexual.
  • Warpath might count, being a Native American mutant who also happens to be the Last of His Kind due to his entire tribe being used for horrible experiments and then slaughtered.
  • Bling, one of the young Mutants trained at the Xavier Institute, is African American and a lesbian. Her crush on Rogue was used as a plot point in one story.
  • Magdelena Marie aka Veda from the Order is half German, half Mexican, as well as female. This is somewhat lampshaded with her dropping her last name (Neuntauben) for the media because people had trouble pronouncing it.
    • If you want to get technical, "Calamity" James Wa is an Asian amputee and Sgt. Milo Fields is a black paraplegic, as well.
  • Connor Hawke, one of DC's Green Arrows, is a mix of White, Black and Korean. Artists and colorists sometimes have trouble don't bother reflecting this in his depiction.
    • Mia Dearden, the current Speedy, is a Twofer: female and HIV positive.
  • In the Bat-Family, Cassandra Cain is a Threefer: female, Asian, and has a learning disability due to her torturous childhood. The family also has Oracle (female, handicapped). Nightwing might count in the context of the Bats: not only is he Roma, but also relatively sane.
  • Renee Montoya is the child of first-generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Afro-Latina, and a lesbian (So a threefer, maybe a fourfer if we are counting being female as a minority). This served as the focus of an award-winning arc in Gotham Central, which revolved around her involuntary outing, and as an ever-present factor in the background as she tried to make her way in the predominantly white, male Gotham City Police Department.
  • Katherine "Kate" Kane, the new Batwoman, is a Jewish lesbian with long (and complicated) history with Renee.
    • Which is ironic, considering that the original Batwoman and Batgirl were created in order to prove that Batman and Robin were not gay.
  • Claremont's Gen 13 run had a threefer - a wheelchair-bound black Muslim. Fourfer if you count his having superpowers.
    • And the original Gen 13 had the Apache lesbian Sarah Rainmaker.
  • Wiccan from the Young Avengers is both Jewish and gay.
    • His boyfriend Hulkling is a gay Kree-Skrull hybrid.
    • Gay-Jewish-Mutant-Gypsy (from his sorta, "it's-a-long-story" mother, Scarlet Witch). Hmm.
  • The Anarchist in X-Statix (at the time X-Force) hangs one of the most blatant lampshades of this trope in recent memory in the first issue: "I'm black, and I'm a mutant. That's like being black twice!"
    • That said, of the 20+ members the team had throughout its existance, only two were heterosexual white-skinned males, and both of them were killed off within an issue of being introduced. All of the members were mutants, of course. The Anarchist was also adopted, though whether that should really count is questionable.
  • When Judd Winick wrote Outsiders, the team rarely featured a member that wasn't visibly non-human or a minority: there's the aforementioned Roma Nightwing, adopted Navajo Arsenal, Japanese Katana, green-skinned Jade, blue-skinned robot Indigo, multi-colored Shift (a sort-of clone of Rex Mason, Metamorpho), and orange-skinned alien Starfire. He tops it off with Asian Amazon bisexual Grace Choi and black lesbian Thunder. A few boring white people eventually join the ranks, including Captain Marvel Jr. and Captain Boomerang, but they don't last.
  • Kasper Cole from the Black Panther comic book series is the child of a white Jewish mother and an African American father.
  • Laura Dean, in Alpha Flight, is black, pre-pubescent, female, and autistic. Also, a mutant. (Not sure that one should count though, since it doesn't make her a minority either on the team or in the real world.)
    • Alpha Flight was an outright freak show at times. Centennial was both black and old (the smallest minority in all of superherodom).
  • The 2011 Teen Titans relaunch introduced Bunker, an openly-gay teenaged superhero from Mexico. He is the first gay member of the main Teen Titans branch.
  • In the early 1990s, Archie Comics had the short-lived black girl Anita in a wheelchair.
  • The second Marvel Comics Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau.
  • Echo (formerly Ronin): Native American, female, and deaf. Also, a cross-dresser.
  • X-Factor's M (aka Monet St. Croix) is a Mulsim woman of French-Algerian parentage who's depicted as Ambiguously Brown.
  • X Wing Series comics don't usually touch on this trope, but "Rogue Squadron 1/2", a short comic taking place just before the run on the Death Star, has four pilots from Red Squadron on a mission. These pilots are Wedge Antilles, Biggs Darklighter, Jek "Piggy" Porkins, and "Doc" Ceresi. Doc is a Twi'lek woman, though unusually stocky and androgynous compared to how Twi'lek women are usually drawn, and she's the one who pulls a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the comic. Everyone else is a human male. Everyone in Red Squadron, as seen in A New Hope, is human and male. Wedge's Gamble later tried to justify this, saying that the Rebellion, in the beginning, was almost entirely a human endeavor, with only a few nonhumans in until the movement started to get off the ground.
    • And of course the Darklighter comic drew Doc as slinky, slender, and clinging to her human male wingmates, once again highlighting that one of these things is not like the others.
  • Scandal Savage from the Secret Six is a biracial (half white, half Native Brazillian) lesbian.
  • The time-travelling DC Comics hero Chronos (no, not the supervillain) is Walker Gabriel. He was adopted as a kid and didn't learn his background till years later, although he was obviously non-white. It turns out he's half-Chinese and half-ancient Mayan. His adoptive parents, incidentally, were also a mixed couple, his dad being white and his mother Asian. In the alternate timeline created when he saves his mother's life by erasing his own history, they adopt a little white girl, instead.
  • Suki Leiber, the main character of the American manga Goofyfoot Gurl is half Japanese, half Jewish. Her whole group of True Companions is very multi-ethnic without being at all anvilicious about it, since they live on the California coast where the Real Life population is pretty varied anyway.
  • Sunfire from Judd Winick's run on Marvel's Exiles was a Japanese lesbian.
  • In the 90's, DC introduced a character who was half-black, half-Vietnamese. Unfortunately, they named him Mongrel.
  • New Warriors had Silhouette, who was half-black, half-Cambodian, female, and fought crime on crutches.
  • In Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers, Shilo Norman (long established as the black Mr Miracle) is also Ambiguously Jewish.
  • Ultimate Marvel has recently introduced Miles Morales, a half black, half Latino child, as the new Spider-Man.
  • One of the new students in Avengers Academy is Ava Ayala aka White Tiger, who is a female Puerto Rican.


Film

  • The Family Stone had a deaf, gay son who was dating a black man.
  • In the 2008 remake of The Women, Jada Pinkett Smith plays a black lesbian.
  • The movie Chasing Amy includes the character Hooper X, a gay black comic writer posing as a militant black panther Expy in order to sell more comics.
    • There's also a white lesbian (who sleeps with men).
  • Dr Joshua Strongbear Sweet in [[Atlantis: The Lost Empire]] is half African-American, half Arapaho.
  • In Roger and Hammerstein's 1997 version of Cinderella, you have a female black for Cinderella (which may or may not count) and the Prince is Asian with a black mother and white father (a threefer).
  • Taylor in High School Musical, black and female.
  • In the movie Cherish, there's a character who is a Jewish gay dwarf who is also wheelchair bound. He points out at one point how he seems to be beaten with an unlucky stick.
  • In Rising Sun, Tia Carrere (herself a twofer) plays a video footage analyst with mixed African-American and Japanese parentage and a withered hand since birth. She explains that this led to her being ostracized and labelled an outcast in her native Japan.
  • Blue in Love, Simon is gay and Jewish. When his identity is revealed, he also turns out to be black.

Literature

  • Susannah Dean of Stephen King's The Dark Tower is black, female, legless and has multiple personality disorder; notably, every other member of her ka-tet is a white male, except for Oy, who is a billy-bumbler (but Oy is male as well).
  • Angua in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, at least in the first book. Later, other women (mostly dwarves) join the force.
    • Played with because only one of her minority statuses is evident. For example, she says "Is this because I'm a w--" and gets cut off before you know she's actually trying to say "werewolf," not "woman."
  • In Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, the main character has deliberately hired a twofer:
    • "Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled CAUCASIAN, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones--not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque."
  • On the subject of Neil Stepheson, Snow Crash's protagonist (named, oddly enough, "Hiro Protagonist") is half black, half Asian.
    • This is referenced multiple times throughout the novel, particularly when a patron of the white supremacist "New South Africa" asks which slur Hiro would prefer to be identified by.
  • The Dresden Files gives us black Russian man Sanya. Possible threefer, given he's an agnostic Knight of the Cross. When asked about his past, Sanya noted that he had to be careful when visiting small towns, because he was such an oddity that he caused accidents when motorists took their eyes off the road to stare at him. Of course, this made him quite angry and resentful when he was a young man, which made him an ideal target for the temptations of the Denarians.
  • Lampshaded by Reba in Red Dragon, the novel to which The Silence of the Lambs is the significantly better-known sequel. She herself is a blind woman who works for a photographic film processing company; she jokes that between her and another woman, the company managed to pack eight different minorities into two hires.
  • Remnants was full of twofers, threefers and fourfers. The cast was ethnically diverse, most ended up orphaned, and some had mutations or physical abnormalities. Tate was a fivefer: a black female lesbian mutant orphan.
  • John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy featured a female black lesbian naval Captain. Considering the series is about a naval taskforce from 2021 being sent back in time to 1942, it didn't end well for her.
    • The female British captain with Pakistani heritage fared better, though it was an uphill battle. Is having two twofers itself a twofer?
  • The two brothers from Holly Black's Valiant are Hispanic and African American.
  • Sammy from The Heroes of Olympus is a Mexican-American mortal. That would make his grandson Leo be part-black, too.
  • In Going Bovine, there's Gonzo, a hypochondriac Mexican dwarf who is later revealed to be gay.
  • Nijinsky from BZRK by Michael Grant is Asian and gay.

Live Action TV

  • Big Time Rush has Kelly who is black and a woman (and also the Only Sane Man, if you count that)
  • 'Celebrity Big Brother Australia', had Anthony Mundine, an Aboriginal Muslim.
  • Thanks to racial blind-casting in Grey's Anatomy , Dr. Cristina Yang is Korean, Jewish-turned-atheist, and dyslexic. The explanation is that her Korean mother married a Jewish man after Cristina was born and thus the whole family converted. Now if ONLY the TV show could've been less afraid of showing gay people...
    • Cristina is also the academic equivalent of a Twofer - a PhD-MD.
    • Callie Torres, the resident Latina, is a lesbian at the moment, making her a threefer.
      • She's definitely been confirmed as bisexual (although it was admittedly sudden and out of nowhere).
  • Probably the most notable and obvious example is Uhura from Star Trek, who was black and female (and was almost the only recurring character with either of these characteristics).
    • Hikaru Sulu has both Japanese and Filipino racial origins, intended to represent all of Asia to the audience.
      • Actually, Sulu was intended to be of solely Japanese origin. It was only when the producers found out Sulu wasn't a Japanese name they changed his origin to Japanese/Filipino.
    • Hoshi on Star Trek: Enterprise (Asian and female).
    • Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation (black and blind).
      • He was originally going to be gay as well.
  • Another old example is Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, a Puerto Rican Jew.
  • Carter from Spin City (black and gay). Lampshaded in an episode where Carter refers to himself as a minority and a character sarcastically remarks "What do you mean, a "minority"? You're black and you're gay. You cover up two thirds of the Earth's surface. You're like water."
    • There was also Janelle, a black woman, which came in handy when the Mayor was accussed of being a racist. Not only did he bring up the various civil rights marches he took part in, he states 'I'm even dating a black woman'.
  • Lisa Gay Hamilton on The Practice (black and female).
  • Lt. Van Buren on Law and Order (black and female). This is lampshaded in one episode, where she notes that people probably think she got the job (as police lieutenant, not actress in a hit legal drama) for diversity reasons.
    • In reality, that was the point of casting the actress. Originally, the cast of Law and Order consisted of six males, only one of whom was a minority. Two men were dropped from the cast (including the black male) and replaced with a white woman and a black woman.
    • In the later seasons, Connie Rubirosa got the double whammy of being latina and a woman, working directly under conservative Michael Cutter and old-guard liberal Jack McCoy.
  • Cambridge on Pie in the Sky (black and female) -- may not count, since the series has multiple female recurring characters, but worth mentioning because she's a Twofer Token Minority in-story, picked by her Pointy-Haired Boss as an efficient way of demonstrating his equal-opportunity-employer credentials.
  • Marissa on Early Edition takes this one step further: She's black, female, and blind.
  • Toshiko Sato on Torchwood, who's Asian, female and bisexual.
  • Lampshaded in "Doctor Who" The Sound of Drums when the Master points out the diversity of the Doctor's "little band" of suddenly-fugitives: Martha Jones is black and female, Jack Harkness is a bisexual white male.
  • Djaq on the BBC Robin Hood, female and Arab.
  • Stevie from Malcolm in the Middle lampshades this, noting that as a black, asthmatic man in a wheelchair, he can get pretty much any job he wants with his "tokenism".
    • Even his dad made use of it once, when he was competing with Crabbe for the babysitter's affection.

Abbe: Oh, do you remember Stevie, my crippled son who recently lost his mother?

  • Det Kima Greggs from The Wire is a fourfer (female, black/Korean mixed-race lesbian). Omar Little is a black gay man; his boyfriends have been Jewish, Hispanic and black. Their status as Twofer Token Minorities is debatable, however—the cast of The Wire is at least two thirds black, and neither character was tokenized.
  • James Spurlock from Thirty Rock is actually called "Toofer" because as one character says "with him you get a two-for-one; he's a black guy and a Harvard guy."
    • Though a later episode had the gang coming up with new nicknames for him, one of which was "Threefer, because you're gay too."
    • This is Lampshaded in a later episode. Floyd interviews for a high-level job; Jack thinks he's a shoo-in until they see that the other candidate for the job is a handicapped black man. "You're not beating that."
  • "Original Cindy" from Dark Angel is a black lesbian.
  • Bobby D. (the D stands for Dershowitz) from In Plain Sight is black and Jewish.
  • Invoked in an episode of The Drew Carey Show, where Drew's brother Steve lost his job at Winnfred-Lauder due to being a crossdresser. After Drew manages to get Steve his job back, Drew asks if Steve is gay. When Steve replies he isn't, Drew says "That's a shame. If you were a gay crossdresser, I could have had you made vice president!" (paraphrased)
  • Willow from Buffy, who describes herself in Season 8 (the comic) as a "gay Wiccan Jewess".
  • In Modern Family, Mitchell and Cameron want to get Lily into an exclusive preschool and figure that they're shoo-ins because she's an adopted Vietnamese girl with two gay dads. They get beaten by an interracial lesbian couple, one of whom is Indian and disabled, with an adopted African baby.
  • This is the entire main cast of Noah's Arc (African-American or Latino and gay), so the Token part doesn't really qualify.
  • Angela Pearly-Gates Montenegro Hodgins in Bones is a "threefer": a half-Asian bisexual female. She's also the daughter of Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and picked her middle name from his guitar.
    • Cam is a African-American female.
  • Castle starts with the recurring character of Dr. Lanie Parish (African-American female), the local medical examiner and Kate's best friend. The latest season also adds Captain Victoria Gates of the same minority groups.
  • Yes Minister: "The perfect representative on a government committee is a disabled black Welsh woman trades-unionist."


Professional Wrestling

  • TNA has Orlando Jordan: Black and openly Bisexual.


Video Games

  • Woozie Mu in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is a blind Asian. Not so much tokenism, as being necessary for the jokes.
  • Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2 is a woman of black and Asian descent... which would make her a three-fer.
    • Her dad, Eli, is black and has a prosthetic leg.
  • The Demoman of Team Fortress 2 calls himself a "a black Scottish cyclops", and laments that there're more <CENSOREDCENSOREDCENSORED> that the like of him
    • But only because he hasn't lost both eyes like the rest of his clan always does by his age.
  • Rochelle in Left 4 Dead 2 is a black woman.
    • However there is also Coach, a black man. This is a step up from the first game which had two white males, a black man and a white woman (also known as the bare minimum of equality).
  • The main cast of Grand Theft Auto IV includes a local druglady Elizabeta Torres (Black/Hispanic female who is also implied to be lesbian or bisexual).
    • And the Ballad of Gay Tony introduces eponymous Anthony Price who is black and homosexual.
  • Deus Ex Human Revolution has Arie van Bruggen, a black gay (or maybe bisexual) Middle-eastern/Dutch hacker who speaks with a Caribbean accent.
  • In almost every game he appears in, Moby Jones of SSX is both the only black and the only British character. The exception was SSX Tricky, where he was joined by Seeiah, an African-American woman.
  • Redguards from The Elder Scrolls, they are black people that live on a desert and dress in islamic clothing. They represent both, the Black and the Arabs.


Web Original

  • From That Guy With The Glasses:
  • Zaboo in The Guild is a self described "Hinjew", half Indian, half Jewish.
  • Chaka, among others in the Whateley Universe. Chaka is a black female bisexual transgender mutant. Is there such a thing as a fivefer? (Pretty much everyone in Poe Cottage at Whateley Academy is automatically a twofer or threefer, since they're all mutants and all LGBTI, and about half of them are female.)
    • And she's 'running up the walls' hyperactive. Sixfer?
    • Totem and Lady Astarte count as mutants with that rarest of minorities in superhero works: age. Totem is over a hundred, and Lady Astarte is in her seventies. Both are still badass.


Western Animation

  • Foxxy Love on Drawn Together is also a threefer: black, female, and bisexual (though it appears Everyone Is Bi according to the Rule of Funny.
  • Elisa Maza from Gargoyles; female, black, Native American.
    • Originally Elisa was Hispanic. She was made half-black and half-Native American to match her voice actress, Salli Richardson.
  • When Dale on King of the Hill is being opposed for Gun Club President, he states that his opponent has "already got the black vote -- Earl -- and the gay vote -- Earl."
  • Asian Reporter Tricia Takanawa on Family Guy. (Asian and female) But that is, of course, part of the point.
  • Supposedly Alexis in Transformers Armada is Vietnamese. However, it's never mentioned anywhere but a writer interview and she looks pretty dang white, so it might not count.
  • Transformers Animated has the Indian girl Sari as the main human character.
  • Transformers Prime has Miko, who is Japanese and the only girl of the three human sidekicks.
  • Toph, blind female, sure.
  • Isabella Garcia-Shapiro from Phineas and Ferb - the only female in the Five-Man Band, she is half Hispanic (specifically Mexican) and half Jewish.
  • Lena Mack from Street Sharks. She's also virtually the only woman there.
    • Augura of Hot Wheels Battle Force 5 (black female in a team of guys) is pretty much a younger version of Lena.
    • Not the first time a Nerd Corps show used this trope, as before Augura, there was Piper. (In both cases, one can argue for another character sharing one of their minority traits: the Storm Hawks also have the dark-skinned rhino-like Junko, while the Battle Force 5 get their intel from a female sentient, and another of the 5 guys is from Thailand.)
    • Piper is also Ambiguously Gay. Don't forget!
  • Conway Stern in the Archer episode "Diversity Hire" is black and Jewish. As the episode name suggests, he was hired specifically so that ISIS could maintain its minority quotas, with Malory even introducing him as a "diversity double-whammy".
  • Mack from Bro Town: it isn't easy being a Scottish-Jewish-Samoan (and ambiguously gay) [1]
  • Numbuh 5 from Codename: Kids Next Door is a black French-American girl.
  • Tish Katsufrakis the eastern European, Jewish vegetarian girl on The Weekenders
  • Shiro from Voltron: Legendary Defender is a threefer, as an ethnically Japanese amputee with PTSD. A flashback episode in Season 7 reveals he's actually a fiver - he's also gay, and has/had (unclear if it was cured) a chronic muscular disease.

Real Life

  • Condoleezza Rice—black, female, rumoured to be gay. Even if the third one isn't true, though, throw in her being a neoconservative politician and you have a very rare gem indeed.
    • The Bush administration in fact had more ethnic minorities than any other in history. Rice was the only twofer minority member of the administration that got into international headlines, thus making the trope more prolific overseas.
  • Stand-up comedian Margaret Cho is a Korean-American female Fag Hag/bisexual, making her a threefer (by her own standards, at least).
  • CNN reporter Soledad O'Brien: female, black, Hispanic.
  • Comedian Stephen K. Amos, black and gay.
  • Much of the discussion around who Barack Obama might nominate to the Supreme Court has centered on such twofers as Sonia Sotomayor (female and Hispanic) and Kathleen Sullivan (female and gay).
    • In the 1930s, Justice Benjamin Cardozo was both Hispanic and Jewish - although his Hispanic heritage has been played down in recent years to allow Sotomayor to take all the credit (and, okay, because he was a white Hispanic from Spain.
  • Current Australian Federal Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penelope "Penny" Ying-yen Wong, Asian lesbian.
  • White Women are becoming this in American advertising. If there are only going to be 3 people in the shot, they want to cover as many bases as possible because of "diversity". As most companies will now use a black male as the lead example of that "diversity", they need to pick a white female as the opposite of the black male, and she covers "white" and "female". The 3rd person can be male or female, but their ethnicity is usually an east Asian Korean or Japanese looking person, or someone who is hispanic. A 4th person will usually be the opposite of the 3rd person (ie an asian male if 3rd was a female hispanic), and only once you start getting to numbers 5 will they put in a "white male".
    • If there's a white male, she's not a twofer. She's only the "female" of the group. Due to Unfortunate Implications, whites are seen by the media as the societal race default.
    • Though that might have at least a bit to do with whites still being the majority in the U.S. as well...
  • Sammy Davis, Jr. was Black, Hispanic and Jewish. In his own words, "When I move into a neighborhood, I wipe it out!"
    • Underlined by his golf one-liner, "Talk about a handicap, I'm a one-eyed Negro Jew"
  • Christopher Titus has a joke about his in his material, talking to his kid while watching CNN; "You see that lady there? She's part black, part Japanese, and part Native American. Networks don't like to hire too many minorities so they pack as many as they can into one person." (paraphrased)
  • U.S. Representative Barney Frank is Jewish and gay.
  • Canada's two most recent Governor Generals, Adrienne Clarkson (born in Hong Kong) and Michelle Jean (born in Haiti) were non-white and female, as well as both being born outside of Canada.
  • Rosario Dawson; half black, half Puerto Rican, and by her own admission a complete nerd.
    • Specifically, she's 1/4 Afro-Cuban, 1/4 Afro-Puerto Rican, 1/4 Native American (Apache-Seminole), and 1/4 Irish.
  • Comedian Freddie Prinze (best known to this generation as Buffy's father-in-law); half Puerto Rican, half Hungarian Jew. He once had a bit where he asked his parents how they met, they said they were on a bus, trying to pick each other's pockets.
  • Richard Pryor; half African-American, half Afro-Puerto Rican.
  • In Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds we have Kid Congo Powers, who is Mexican and gay, in a band of (allegedly, there was that one time Nick and Blixa kissed, and Nick's manlove comments in his autobiography)) straight white guys.
  • Writer Audre Lorde, who was black, lesbian, and legally blind.
  • Enka singer Jero is African-American, one-quarter Japanese, and an emigrant to Japan.
  • British actress Sophie Okonedo, who is half Nigerian, half Ashkenazi Jew.
    • After she and her Irish partner gave birth to a daughter, she quipped "She's going to be an Irish, Nigerian Jew."
  • Australian Prime Minister Julia Gilard is both a woman and a redhead. And an atheist, a pretty remarkable threefer for mainstream politics.
    • And Welsh with trade union connections. Goes quite a way towards Sir Humphry's criteria.
  • Tiger Woods certainly fits in this trope; He's 1/4 African-American, 1/4 Thai, 1/4 Chinese, 1/8 Native-American and 1/8 Dutch. He even has created a word for his ethnic make-up (Cablinasian).
  • Bruce Lee, and also his children, Brandon and Shannon Lee count as this. Bruce Lee was 3/4 Chinese and 1/4 German. His children thus were mixed Chinese, German, Anglo-Saxon and Swedish.
  • In the band The Black Eyed Peas, apl.de.ap is a Black Filipino, Fergie is white, native American, Mexican, and female, and Taboo is Mexican and Shoshone.
  • Thin Lizzy singer/bassist Phil Lynott: half Irish, half black Brazilian. Bonus points for the band including Scott Gorham, a token American.
  • Zheng He, 15th-century Chinese explorer (mentioned above in Comic Books) has got to count: Muslim and a eunuch.
  • Rock singer Freddie Mercury (of Queen) was both Asian (South Asian, to be specific) and gay.
  • The former French Minister of Parliamentary Relations and current Ambassador to the OECD, Roger Karroutchi, is a threefer: he's gay, Moroccan, and Jewish.
  • Zaha Hadid, the world's most prominent female architect, is an Iranian Muslim.
  • Mitt Romney, one of the candidates in the 2012 United States presidential election, is Mormon and half-Mexican.
  • Mia Love, current mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah is a female Mormon Republican of Haitian descent.

Other

  • As a famous Jewish joke puts it, a Jewish man once gets on a bus and sees a black man reading a newspaper in Hebrew. The Jew then exclaims:

Ha! It's not enough for him that he's black!

    • Subverted in Israel with the Ethiopian Jews. They were a religious minority in Ethiopia, then airlifted to Israel, where they learned modern Hebrew because it was the official language of their new home country.