http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PositiveDiscrimination
When the Token Minority can do no wrong. She (this is most often seen with the lone female character) will never bumble or make a mistake (even in a show where the majority of the team does), she will be much smarter and have more common sense than average, she has more knowledge and skill than she has any reason to possess given her background, she will definitely be of superior moral character, and she can probably kick your ass too.
She may not be the star who actually saves the day (In fact, she almost never will save the day in the end), but she will never hinder the progress of the team. In fact, this trope is far more blatant if she's in a relatively minor role but is consistently better than the non-minority male lead at damn near everything.
There doesn't seem to be much middle ground between this and the Faux Action Girl; people go to extremes.
Sometimes the writers are being deliberately Anvilicious about equality and discrimination. Other times, they're just concerned about looking sexist or racist if the only "X" on the show does something wrong, since "X" isn't on the list of Acceptable Targets, and they overcompensate the other direction. Rarely do they come across the solution of simply having more than one "X", which is, of course, half the problem of the Token Minority in the first place.
This trope can usually be averted simply by adding more than one of the given minority; then they can spread the competence around. Failing that, they can try not making it a big deal that the character is X, and maybe no one will care that they're also depicted as flawed human beings (what a concept!) Speculative Fiction can manage the latter pretty well by creating a culture where women/"minorities" are in positions of power and no one thinks it's unusual (invoking Fantastic Racism optional), but sometimes they dip into this trope anyway.
Compare with Mary Sue and Marty Stu. Contrast with Closer To Earth. Taking the polar opposite tack leads to Mighty Whitey and Unfortunate Implications. A very frequent character trait of the Gamer Chick.
Examples
Anime
Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, the sole female on her team, is better than every other member at everything they do, from hand-to-hand combat, to stealth, to sniping, to hacking, and so on. However, she isn't very specialized, and her team compensates for her deficiencies. In Solid State Society it is also shown that her team is entirely capable without her, although they do miss her skills.
In Solid State Society, it's stated that because they had to replace Motoko with Badass Normal Togusa, they had to shift the focus of the team to slightly more manageable cases, and expanded the team to compensate so they could cover several cases at once.
As far as this troper was able to determine from the movie, expansion of the team had already been in progress when the Major left, as exemplified by Azuma and Yano in the second season, and the changing focus of the organization was a deliberate decision done unrelated to her absence, as well. Also, there simply isn't a nationwide terrorist-related crisis going on all the time.
Kirika and Mirielle from Noir are assassins who regularly use bumbling male thugs for target practice. Most male antagonists in this series fall under the "bumbling thug" descriptor. When they go up against more elegant, dangerous, and skilled opponents, the opponents are almost always female..
There is a noncombatant male who pretty much has Mireille dancing to his tune, and gets her to get rid of his dangerous competition, who happens to be the show's Big Bad, and the person ultimately responsible of the death of Mireille's dead parents, however.
Averted nicely in Naruto. While there aren't as many female characters in the series, the ones that there are have the same overblown personalities and mixture of weakness and strength that the guys do. The most recent chapters also introduced characters who are noticeably darker than the rest of the cast, and they promise to have the same quirky and over the top characterizations as everyone else.
Comic Books
Scott Adams, the writer/artist of the comic strip Dilbert, has trouble including minorities in his central cast because he loves deeply-flawed characters, and knows that people write letters when the one visible member of a given group is dumb, a criminal, or lazy. He created Asok, an intern from India, as a workaround, as his flaw is naiveté and inexperience, things that are clearly temporary. He still got letters.
Adams also created a character named "Tina the Brittle Technical Writer", a woman with a very short fuse and very strong opinions on every subject, mostly negative. He was lambasted for stereotyping women. In response, he jokingly created Antina (antidote to Tina), a character he tried to make as completely non-stereotypical as possible, down to her muscles. He then received letters complaining he was stereotyping lesbians. As he put it in one of the books, "It appeared I could not win." Tina stayed in the strip but became something of a generic character and patsy.
Adams got around the similar issue of finding Acceptable Nationality Targets by inventing Elbonia, a backwards, mud-drenched Ruritania that is "foreign to all my readers". He described it as a "second world country; they have plenty of food, they just don't like it."
Speaking of "didn't work," doesn't Elbonia sound a little bit like Albania? (The "not-quite-in-Europe" material culture does a lot for that, too.)
That would also work for Armenia (elbow/arm ... geddit?)
In his commentary book "7 years of highly defective people" he insisted his editors do the coloring, and choose the worst times to add diversity to the cast. The strip he was commentating on was about a thieving security guard who was colored to be black.
Arguably the reason that Black Panther's African country of Wakanda should be lifting into the air and hovering far above the backwards, petty influence of all those... well, every other ethnicity there is... any day now.
The Wakandians seem pretty content to just let everyone else die horribly. They've cured cancer and AIDS but won't share the tech with anyone else for no given reason and during the Skrull Invasion their tech allowed them to detect the impostors, of course they never mentioned that whole "our plant is being invaded by shapeshifting aliens" thing to anyone.
They probably could have destroyed all the Skrulls, too. Dicks.
There was a time in the 80's when Marvel Comics' two flagship ensemble teams, the X-Men and Avengers, both had black female leaders. However, there's a reason why Storm caught on with readers and became a very popular character and Captain Ersatz Marvel (yes, that Captain Marvel) did not. Basically, the latter was a girl scout who was as close to being The Cape without actually wearing one, whereas the former actually had more than one dimension and is an interesting character in her own right.
What happened to Captain Marvel was Executive Meddling all the way. Mark Gruenwald, then the writer of Captain America, was also the editor of Avengers. He wanted Cap. A. to be the Avengers leader, by having Cap. M. be revealed as incompetent to lead. When Cap. M.'s writer (and creator of the character) wouldn't play ball, he was replaced and the Character Derailment went ahead.
A particularly common theme in comics is to have black scientists as well (much moreso than you would expect the ratio to be in real life), especially circa the 1970s or 80s, where it would likely have seemed ironic and well intentioned of the writers- Cyborg's parents (and his potential love interest at STAR Labs), Bumblebee of the Teen Titans, and more. Marvel examples include Thunderball (the ONLY black member of the universally idiotic thugs in The Wrecking Crew was the brilliant nuclear physicist), Vermin, and streetwise more standard-type geniuses like Hobie Brown, among others.
There's also Chimestro(Hood's go to science guy) and Deadly Nightshade from MODOK'S 11.
In an early Boodocks strip, Riley assumed that all white people are funny and intelligent. Not actually having met any white people until moving to Woodcrest, he stereotyped them based on sitcoms he watched.
Commercials
Used widely in kid-directed commercials. Picture this scenario: Two kids are having a race in an RC car commercial. As their two cars near the finish line, a third comes out of nowhere and beats them to the punch, doing flashy maneuvers the all the way. Mouths gaping, the two boys exchanges awestruck glances and the camera panels to the mystery racer. If you hadn't guessed already, yes, it turns out to be some random girl holding the controller.
Also works for minorities. Some white kid will be sitting around, wearing bland clothes, with a bland haircut, and looking horribly bored while holding a product. Then, with a burst of hip-hop, in sweeps the black kid, wearing trendy clothes with plenty of bling, and of course he's got the far superior version of the product! The white kid looks on with resigned, mournful envy as the black kid dances up a storm. No, really, Gogurt did this exact commercial, and slightly milder variations are quite popular, especially for food products.
Watch any commercial - be it for beer, cars, or anything else under the sun - where a man is for some reason in conflict with a female. See how many times the man wins versus how many times the woman wins. In the world of commercials, the best a man can do is somehow tie with the woman, unless he's teaming up with another woman.
If at any point the man says "Let's show you how the men do it" or any variation thereof, the chance of him even tying becomes zero. It's gotten to the point where this male troper is actually insulted by it and is starting to swear off products that think that's the best way to advertise themselves.
The strangest thing about this whole trend? These type of commercials, with incompetent, bumbling men being shown up by smirking, superior women are overwhelmingly for the more male-dominated fields perceived to be macho... beer, sports, and tools. It's essentially like shilling wine, theater, and arts & crafts with bikini babes.
Averted in a commercial for Oreos. A white cop and a black cop decide to see who can finish their stack of oreos first, and the white cop wins. Whether this was an intentional aversion is anyone's guess.
Given the use of 'Oreo' as a slang term, it just be just plain meta.
Also averted in two well-known British series of commercials - one for Nuts magazine (women can't do anything without "help" from men) and one for Flash cleaning products, which ran for years. In the Flash adverts, a man sees a woman scrubbing away at a stubbornly-dirty floor or cooker, offers to do it for her, and then uses Flash to clean without any effort. He then receives praise for his hard work, and doesn't tell the woman how he did it. The effect of both of these is irritating enough that it becomes clear why most advertisers don't do this.
Played ridiculously straight in this commercial for some sort of oven cleaning product. From the woman standing in the background with what can only be described as a scowl on her face, to the tagline "So easy...even a man could do it!", it's actually rather disgusting.
Said advert received 663 complaints from men and women (men claiming it portrayed them as idiots, women claiming it supported out-of-date stereotypes regarding women and the kitchen). Amazingly, they were not upheld - which sparked backlash from people saying an opposite advert would be shot down immediately.
The Daily Mail had a field day.
Film
In Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Jane Smith is professional and usually the one to be in control of the situation. John Smith makes bumbling mistakes and more than once seems to succeed purely on luck.
He is also not as cold-hearted as his wife. It appears she paid for that skill with her charisma and wisdom stats.
There is a partial aversion during their "bring down the house" fight scene in that, while Jane Smith is much more skilled when it comes to guns, the moment they get into a hand-to-hand fight, she's absolutely no match for him.
Occurs in the movie of Get Smart due to Values Dissonance. Agent 99 being the competent and experienced professional while Maxwell Smart was a blundering incompetent was originally a surprising and subversive twist... but now it just seems like this; in fact they seem to have made Maxwell more competent in order to compensate.
Welllll, in the original, 99 follows Smart around with puppy-dog eyes, obeying his every inanity. In the modern one, she's clearly the senior partner in the relationship, and she thinks he's a moron
A scene in the film Dogma depicts two angels condemning a room full of businessmen for their sins. Most of them are true scumbags for various reasons, but the sole female in the room is apparently so flawless (or at least not as much of a scumbag) that Loki has to point out that she didn't say "God bless you" when he sneezed. He still doesn't kill her, though.
If I recall, she was the secretary. It probably had more to do with not being a rich bastard than being a woman. Still valid, though.
A non-female example: the film U-571, where Eddie Carson, the black steward, winds up piloting a sub in combat situations with no training or previous experience.
Note that this might be Truth In Television; although not encouraged to do so, many WWII Navy stewards did fully qualify as submariners capable of serving in many capacities during battle stations.
Similarly, the case of Seaman Dorie Miller at Pearl Harbor; a black cook who dragged his commanding officer to safety, manned an AA gun and shot down several attacking aircraft under heavy fire.
If I remember correctly, this comes down to actual Navy requirements. Serving aboard a submarine as your post, you literally are required to learn everything about it, as well as how to do pretty much every job (except, you know, stuff like cook and chaplain).
Winston Zeddemore may not be the most brilliant of The Ghostbusters, but he is clearly the most professional and has the most common (and social) sense, without any of his coworkers' character quirks. He also never screws up in the ways Peter, Ray, or even Egon do. All the more blatant given that, in most adaptations, he's the Naive Newcomer.
Ironically, Winston was originally intended as the character with the most combat experience and all the best lines, but the writers thought they were having a "reverse discrimination" moment and decided to make him the character the others could play off of. Though this might not be about him being black but rather, because he worked for a living.
Averted in the cartoon version with Janine: when she occasionally has to don the Ghostbusters gear, she's naturally got bad aim and doesn't know how to use half the equipment since she's never been trained.
Pick any kids' sports movie, and there will be one female player on the team. This girl will never miss a shot or strike out on camera. (Arguably, this implementation began with the original Bad News Bears movie in the 1970s.)
This trope has carried over to video games, especially in webcomics.
The Bourne Series. All the important female characters are pretty unambiguously good; except for Bourne himself nearly all the important male characters are corrupt and/or outright sociopaths.
Julia Stiles' character does spent the first two films trying to kill Bourne, but only because she was given false information.
This is one of the rules set down for The Lone Ranger: all villains had to be white to avoid accusations of racism.
Sidney Poitier's most famous starring roles in Lilies of the Field, To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. For the most part, all these roles have Poitier playing men who are nearly perfect specimens of humanity except for a bit of righteous anger at injustice. Dinner is the most blatant with character being less a man than an demigod of perfection.
To be fair, this is a bit of Type Casting as Poitier is pretty much a demigod of perfection IRL, am I right?
And, also to be fair, Dinner was also an example of an necessary anvil. Poitier's character had to be an all around great person to drive the point.
Hilariously subverted in Sneakers. For most of the film, Poitier's character is his typical eloquent, composed, genteel family man. During the film's climactic confrontation, however, he and Dan Aykroyd's character are kidnapped by a pair of mooks. Poitier turns to Aykroyd, says "Hey, you know why they kicked me out of the CIA? My temper" and proceeds to beat the crap out of one of the mooks, and he screams "Motherfucker, mess with me and I split ya head!" Worth the price of admission.
To Sir With Love was criticised for saying that black people should be accepted in society - so long as they are educated and well-spoken.
Let's not forget that in In the Heat of the Night it turns out that Both Poitier and the Sheriff let their feelings cloud their judgment, with Poitier suspecting a man of murder purely because he was a racist
In the new Charlies Angels films, all the men are either buffoons, evil, secretly evil, or a disembodied voice on a speaker phone. Then again, all the women other than the Angels are also secretly evil.
Lampshaded in The Animal: Miles, the only black man employed at the airport, is constantly complaining that, because he's black, the others treat him as if he could do no wrong, and ignore anything he does - such as smoking in a federal building - that would prove otherwise.
Becomes a Chekhovs Gun when Miles claims to be the monster to keep the mob from killing the main character. The mob immediately disbands to avoid getting charged with a hate crime, and Miles stands there as they walk off, screaming about 'reverse racism'
Averted in Inside I'm Dancing: Rory is in a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy, which doesn't stop him being a bit of an asshole. But still, a pretty cool guy.
"Your only disability, Rory, is that you're an arsehole!"
In the future of Virtuosity, the prisons are filled to overflowing with white people (who are all, of course, white supremacists). In fact, Denzel Washington's character may be the only black guy in prison in the future. And he's a cop. And it was basically a bogus rap.
Averted in the live action Dragonball Evolution movie. The main bully Carey Fuller, who is of obvious black/African descent, displays not an inkling of positive or redeeming features. He has no qualms about destroying Goku's bike or trying to assault Goku at a party with his white, Asian, and mixed race followers.
Averted bizarrely in the original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). The evil gang is formed by an alliance of 4 ethnic gangs: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian.
Also averted in the Disney film Cheetah, where the three villains include one White guy, one Asian (Indian), and one African.
Literature
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time seems to have this at first glance: Half of the nations and organizations in that world are openly matriarchal, and in the rest the women are in control anyway. But it soon turns into what's almost a reversal, or even StrawFeminism, since all women in this world turn out to be both incompetent and jerkasses. It just bugs me.
You think the men are any better? Everyone in that world is an incompetent jerkass. It's like a crapsack world for intelligence. *tugs braid*
You know, he said in a lot of interviews that he puts a little of his wife into all of his female characters. If you assume he made all of the women like that intentionally... Makes you wonder what he really thought of her.
Of the four protagonists of Patrick Tilley's The Amtrack Wars, the two guys are pretty deeply flawed, get slightly better or a lot worse, and die. The two girls wind up more or less saints by the end, and live.
Subverted in the Discworld book Jingo, where 71-Hour Achmed tells Vimes "Truly treat all men equally. Allow Klatchians the right to be scheming bastards."
The Watch series has this as a running theme, especially in Men At Arms. Due to the speciesism that pervades Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari's demand that the Watch better represent the city's "ethnic" makeup means including a dwarf, a troll, and a werewolf on the Watch.
In Robinson Crusoe, the black man Friday is portrayed as nigh superhuman in virtue, physical condition and even intelligence (he learns English VERY quickly.) This is close to the idea of a Noble Savage and is also Crusoe's argument for the white man's burden.
Live Action TV
The seventh season of Red Dwarf introduced a female crewmember who quickly proved the most competent of any of them (not a challenge given the competition, granted...) They thankfully backed off this some in later episodes. It should be pointed out, however, that she came from an alternate universe where the Red Dwarf crew were all more competent than their "regular" universe counterparts. A recurring theme had Kochanski berating Lister for not being as competent as her Dave. However, there was a lot of implication that they were more competent because of her, so it still stands.
More importantly, the non-robot/computer crew of the Red Dwarf was previously composed of the two lowest ranking people on the ship, in addition to a life form evolved from Dave's cat. The Cat was not thought of too highly by the rest of the cat people either. Kochanski never had much competition.
A subversion was Holly from Series 3-5, played by Hattie Hayridge. The character admitted in one episode to being a "deranged, half-witted computer" and in another couldn't even count without banging her head on the screen.
Remember, though, that Holly in series 1 and 2 was played by Norman Lovett. She's stupid now because he was stupid then.
In the comedy Chalk, Suzy Travis is the sarcastic, intelligent straight man to the rest of the teaching department's idiotic fools - especially headmaster Mr Slatt. However, this is subverted in the second season as she slowly turns into Slatt herself.
Averted in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Sweet Dee is as flawed as everyone else.
This is particularly fun, as Sweet Dee is occasionally given to reprimanding the rest of the cast for being such idiots, or so immoral, in classic "level-headed female character" mode... then she goes off and does something equally idiotic and immoral, while clinging tenaciously to her moral high ground.
NewsRadio - the sole black character, Bill's co-anchor Catherine Duke, was by far the least ridiculous person at the station. Also the dullest, which is why few noticed her departure in the middle of the fourth season.
Dave and Lisa were also more or less normal, as well as more successful. Still, in one episode when Bill is listing the positive traits of all his coworkers, for Catherine he simply says, "You're a woman, and you're black, oh what I wouldn't give!"
The Office (USA): Even though Stanley and Darryl are clearly rude and obnoxious, Michael constantly ignores it for the cameras, fearing accusations of racism. The show is also pretty impressive when it comes to gender: the female characters are exactly as flawed as the male ones.
Pretty much any family sitcom involves a wife who is far more intelligent and level headed than her spouse. This usually leads to one or two episodes where the trend is reversed so the husband can be right at least once. This one pretty much goes back to The Honeymooners.
Although sometimes they make it so the wife is still right anyway because the husband starts flaunting the fact he was right and messes up again.
Averted in Dexter, where Hispanic female Lieutenant LaGuerta was promoted due to luck and political reasons. She's competent, is interested in justice and so on, but also ruthlessly political in her desire to advance her own career.
Heavily averted in the books, where she's impied to be deeply incompetent.
This troper started to feel a bit uncomfortable with the disdainful portrayal of the various minority characters in the books until she realized that they and, in fact, the rest of the characters were being viewed through Dexter's sociopathic filter. At which point she kicked herself for not seeing it sooner.
Western Animation
The Simpsons began its existence with Marge and Lisa being clearly smarter and more sensible than their male relatives. This was taken to the extreme in an episode where it was revealed that there was a "Simpson gene" for stupidity which only affected males (we don't mention that episode much, and the writers seem to have retconned it). As the series progressed, Marge developed her own idiotic habits, but so did everyone else in Springfield... save Lisa, who apparently absorbed every ounce of common sense and intelligence in the city. Of course, it didn't have anywhere else to go.
Says you. Lisa's Flanderization into a one-dimensional Soapbox Sadie makes this troper view her as the show's Wesley. The reason that she and her ideological cohorts are the only smart characters on the show is because the writers arrange it so that she's always right.
It's also been shown that Lisa...isn't a particularly nice person when things don't go her way. Remember the time she thought she and her bother killed Martin and tried to cover it up?
Not to mention when she became a vegetarian she couldn't handle that her family wern't, and proceded to shove her lifestyle choice down everyone else's throat and make them convert by ruining the BBQ. Also, she becomes an obnoxious fundamental atheist in the episode with that angel skeleton in the stone, sneering at her mother's faith.
And she was shown to be right about the angel skeleton, too. The writers just love Lisa.
She doesn't become an atheist, she is skeptical that an ANGEL SKELETON was found in her town. This episode seems not to be about Lisa being unusually smart, but the rest of Springfield being exceptionally gullible or dishonest (ie. a geneticist lying about the results of a bone sample test for no apparent reason).
Nothing fundamental about atheism, either.
Patty and Selma, probably the two least likable characters on the show, are also female, and are shown living pretty pathetic lives.
Carl was far and away the smartest of Homer's friends and pretty much never screwed up (although also hardly ever spoke). Lenny and Carl slowly became dimmer to make them into a comedy duo, and the two are now very much alike, but Carl is still notably smarter than Lenny...and can dunk like Jordan.
Dr Hibbert was originally the only competent person in Springfield until he went through Flanderization into a rich doctor who laughed inappropriately. Springfield police department brings us another example with Lou and this was even mentioned on one of the earlier season's DVD commentary. In Springfield, everyone is stupid unless they're Lisa or black. However, Dr. Hibbert has been increasingly shown as having less and less competency than we were initially believed, in one instance, showing signs of nervousness when the kids were about to reveal that someone in town was practicing medicine without a license. It was Homer.
His wife (also black) is implied to be an alcoholic in one episode.
Lampshaded in King of the Hill, where Peggy envisions herself as the suffering smart one but is actually far less sensible than Hank.
Averted with Kahn, Hank's Laotian neighbor, who from day one has been portrayed as a racist Jerk Ass. In the first episode they meet, Hank doesn't want to associate with him and Peggy accuses Hank of being a racist, causing Hank to remark, "What kind of country is this where you can only hate a man if he's white?"
Averted in Rugrats with Angelica, who is a conniving and bossy and usually gets her comeuppance, but played straight with Susie, the black girl and paragon of perfection.
The major reason for the general fandom rejection of Lola Bunny in Space Jam, who aside from being the only new character didn't follow any of the usual humorous slapstick conventions. For instance, late in the film, Bugs pushes her out the way when one of the Monstars is about to squash her, as though she, unlike all the other toons and even Bugs himself afterwards, will not just get flattened like a pancake or some other temporary cartoon injury that is easy to recover from. Even a human character in the movie gets flattened and does not receive permanent damage.
Babs Bunny avoided this, although her style of humor had always been more in dialogue than slapstick. Tiny Toon Adventures in general has done a decent job of splitting the idiocy between the male and female halves of the cast; again, it helps when there's more than one girl.
Illustrated quite well in The Fairly Oddparents. Although (much like The Simpsons) the emphasis on humor quickly turned the entire cast into idiots, viewers were constantly reminded that Cosmo and Timmy's dad were far stupider than their female counterparts Wanda and Mrs. Turner.
Not so much with Timmy's mom, since they use her to get a lot of cheap jokes about being an old woman, and she's consistently portrayed as being as incompetent as her husband. Wanda's naggyness is also a female stereotype that gets played up frequently.
She was completely Flanderized, perhaps more than anyone else. She used to hand out rather sensible advice on wishes and would tell Cosmo he's being dumb, but now she's just nagging all the time. Uh...
To be fair, most bricks are smarter than Cosmo.
With Danny Phantom, Butch Hartman was able to do it all over again with Danny's parents. In the early episodes, though goofy, Jack was portrayed as a visionary ghost-hunter whose over-enthusiasm often got in the way of common sense, while Maddie was soft-spoken and more of his assistant. By halfway into the first season, it completely flipped: Maddie became the bold action-oriented commanding ghost hunter, while Jack could barely even point a rifle in the right direction.
Positive Discrimination was also regularly expressed by Sam, constantly the voice of reason to the perpetually Idiot Ball-holding Danny and Tucker, and Jazz, the perfect student in contrast to her Book Dumb little brother.
Danny eventually averts this for the most part come Season Three through Character Development. If anything, he's only Book Dumb moments occur as an excuse to give Sam a reason to nag, an act that is all but pointless by that point.
In Yin Yang Yo, the two main leads are basically girl and boy versions of each other. Yin is the overly girlish girl who likes ponies and anything pink and naturally is the more studious, mature, and level-headed of the two. Yang is a crass, crude-humor spouting blue bunny who likes boyish things like monster trucks, mindless video games, fighting anything that moves, and not studying. Also the more likely to receive physical slapstick. Once again, the three shows share writers and directors, so not much of a surprise.
In Atomic Betty, Paloma is a token minority with more powers than the rest of the cast (good guys and villains alike), no flaws whatsoever, genius IQ, probably enough psychic powers to take over the world, but since her role is to be a token minority she's like 1% of the show, and never gets to beat up any bad guys, save the world, gets any substantial adventures of her own, or even get to do some comment on Betty's adventures. This troper fully expects Paloma was added in to fullfill some obscure ethnic quota requirement without actually having a role in the adventures of the white (or occasionally green) people. Walt Disney (the man not the company) would be proud...
Gwen of Ben10 is generally portrayed as smarter, more competent, and all around better than Ben, despite Ben being the main character. Culminates in the TV Movie, in which Gwen is portrayed as selfless and Ben as selfish respectively. Riiiight...
Don't forget the episode "Gwen 10", where Gwen is instantly better with the Omnitrix.
And when it's time to hand out An Aesop, Ben's always the one it's handed to (or beat over the head with). Despite Gwen almost always having just as big a part in her arguments with Ben as he did (being insulting, condescending, shrill, and, well, argumentative), no one ever seemed to express that this might be a bad thing, not even with a "catch more flies with honey" type thing.
In Alien Force, Gwen's attitude is toned down.
However, in some ways it seems to have been replaced with a more subtle form, where Ben and Kevin can needle each other, she can needle them, but very very few barbs ever get aimed at her. Her powers also come with little to no limitations or drawbacks such as Ben has to deal with from the Omnitrix. Gwen getting preferential authorial treatment is just a lot less noticeable since she's not being a complete bitch all the time.
In Daria, the two major African-American kid characters at Lawndale High, Jodie and Mack, seem to be the only ones outside a handful of others who have intelligence and integrity enough to earn Daria's respect.
Jodie often calls attention to this fact, usually by complaining about how hard she has to work to keep up the expectation.
Subverted in The Proud Family when Penny dates Johnny, a wheel-chair bound boy, out of pity. However, it turns out that Johnny is a very rude and horrible person who uses his disability to his advantage to make people do things for him. Eventually, Penny has enough and tells him to take a hike.
Another subversion is when Penny joins the football team. The coach reluctantly puts her in the game after attempting to put in everyone else, like his waterboy son. Everything seems to follow the aforementioned case of the single girl in a team, including Penny being single-handedly responsible for her team's comeback...and the she fails to catch what would have be the game winning touch down and cries. She still convinces the boys that she can play, though.
Foxxy Love of Drawn Together is consistently portrayed as the smartest, most moral character on the show (though that isn't saying much). She is even referred to in one episode as being "the only person in the house who isn't completely retarded". In contrast, the show's white characters (Hero, Clara, and Toot) are fair game for all kinds of abuse.
Also subverted, in that she plays up absolutely every other stereotype of a black woman. So Yeah.
Her more responsible nature seems to come from her originator in Josie And The Pussycats... who might also be an example of this trope.
Sealab 2021 invokes this trope with Dr. Quinn, in order to mock it.
Averted with Genki Girl Frida Suez of El: Tigre. She is just as mischievous and misguided as Manny, if not more so. In the same vein as Babs, she also suffers double the amount of painful-looking slapstick than her male co star.
In Wolverine and the X-Men, when Wolverine is unconscious after braving a fire to save a little girl, the little girl's parents want to help him (risking their whole family), but another member of the group wants to turn him in to the mutant registration forces. Fair enough. The little girl's parents are also a mixed race couple and the other guy is white. Okay, fine. Except the mixed-race couple are toned, young, attractive, and wearing fashionable clothes, while the white guy is fat, middle-aged, balding, and wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts. Successful mix of Positive Discrimination and an Acceptable Target.
Though this sort of thing was actually averted in the original X-Men cartoon. The anti-mutant bigots were shown to include people of all races, which goes to show that nothing brings people of different races and creeds together quite like finding an even smaller minority to gang up on.
Barbie in A Christmas Carol has Barbie's Black Best Friend Christi playing a living saint while Barbie is in the role of The Grinch.
Played with and then mocked in a Robot Chicken sketch where they play a skit once, then play it with the races reversed. Then they do something completely unrelated to the previous two skits. Each is bookened by a scientist asking what the audience feels about the skits, then concluding something completely nonsensical.
Other
In the Lego series Bionicle, each Toa team has only one female on it, the main three so far being Gali, Nokama and Hahli. In each case they are the least flawed and the wisest (and in Gali's case, most agile) members of their teams. Particularly noticeable in Legends Of Metru Nui in which each Toa is given a major character flaw which they must overcome to unlock their individual mask powers, such as Vakama's lack of confidence and Matau's inability to stop and think before rushing in. Not only is Nokama's flaw relatively small (not admitting when she's wrong), it is only referenced once and she overcomes it very early on, extremely quickly.
Back in the mid-90s, the US Department of Justice once did a study regarding child support and just who was (and who wasn't) making their payments. What they found out was that almost 78% of non-custodial fathers paid their child support on time and in full. The percentage of non-custodial mothers who did the same? 41%. But you only ever heard about deadbeat dads, because the absolute numbers were far higher. Of course, that's often believed to be Positive Discrimination at work in its own right - mothers get primary custody a large majority of the time, which would seem to imply that the judicial system is biased towards giving it to them.
Alternatively, the judicial system is unbiased and simply reflects an underlying tendency for a better result to be achieved when the mother gets custody.
Women receive shorter sentences than men for the same crime pretty much everywhere. (In Spain, the law literally says that domestic violence by women only gets half the punishment.) Even under shari'a law, a woman who renounces Islam is imprisoned until she agrees to become Muslim again; a man who renounces Islam is put to death.
Um... shari'a law? The one where being raped is a capital offense? I don't think that's such a great example. As for Spain, that's probably an outgrowth of negative discrimination because women aren't seen to be as strong and therefore can't do as much damage.
Which matters... why? Whether you build a bomb and blow up a building or build a bomb and try to blow up a building but it turns out to be a dud, you still tried to blow up a building. How successful you are shouldn't have anything to do with your punishment.
Though I can't speak for the other troper, I'm not sure the statement itself indicates a support of the reduced penalty, but rather what kind of racism is at play. Both positive and negative discrimination can have all sorts of side effects. Such as being able to phone it in on subjects you're considered predestined to fail at, while having to work double time to meet the impossible standards of a supposed innate talent.
On the flip side, women receive LONGER sentences than men for child abuse and neglect because they are supposed to be more 'nuturing'... Law is full of double standards.
Where have you heard that? As far as this troper is aware, women who kill their own newborns are considered to have committed a lesser offence, at least in Canada. Though this may have been overturned more recently.
Destiny's Child's "Bills, Bills, Bills", is about a woman who thinks her boyfriend should be paying for "things [his] money should be handling". Among his other sins are driving her car without filling up the tank, and asking to borrow money. Despite openly admitting she's only dating the guy for the money, the singer is supposed to be sympathetic. The chorus is her listing her bills he should be paying. She also complains about him using her credit card. Strangely, if a guy was complaining about a woman maxing out his card and not being able to support him, he'd be seen as sexist.
You triflin', good for nothing type of brother
Silly me,why haven't I found another
A baller, when times get hard he's the one to help me out
Instead of a scrub like you who don't know what a man's about
Oddly, This Troper first heard the song as covered by Jonathan Coulton and assumed it was about a mooching sibling/friend, and thought it was a fair call if the guy was going to be running up his phone bill and using up all his gas. Put either the singer or the subject in an opposite gender and it really does put a different slant on it.
When the Token Minority can do no wrong. She (this is most often seen with the lone female character) will never bumble or make a mistake (even in a show where the majority of the team does), she will be much smarter and have more common sense than average, she has more knowledge and skill than she has any reason to possess given her background, she will definitely be of superior moral character, and she can probably kick your ass too.
She may not be the star who actually saves the day (In fact, she almost never will save the day in the end), but she will never hinder the progress of the team. In fact, this trope is far more blatant if she's in a relatively minor role but is consistently better than the non-minority male lead at damn near everything.
There doesn't seem to be much middle ground between this and the Faux Action Girl; people go to extremes.
Sometimes the writers are being deliberately Anvilicious about equality and discrimination. Other times, they're just concerned about looking sexist or racist if the only "X" on the show does something wrong, since "X" isn't on the list of Acceptable Targets, and they overcompensate the other direction. Rarely do they come across the solution of simply having more than one "X", which is, of course, half the problem of the Token Minority in the first place.
This trope can usually be averted simply by adding more than one of the given minority; then they can spread the competence around. Failing that, they can try not making it a big deal that the character is X, and maybe no one will care that they're also depicted as flawed human beings (what a concept!) Speculative Fiction can manage the latter pretty well by creating a culture where women/"minorities" are in positions of power and no one thinks it's unusual (invoking Fantastic Racism optional), but sometimes they dip into this trope anyway.
Compare with Mary Sue and Marty Stu. Contrast with Closer To Earth. Taking the polar opposite tack leads to Mighty Whitey and Unfortunate Implications. A very frequent character trait of the Gamer Chick.
Examples
Anime
Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, the sole female on her team, is better than every other member at everything they do, from hand-to-hand combat, to stealth, to sniping, to hacking, and so on. However, she isn't very specialized, and her team compensates for her deficiencies. In Solid State Society it is also shown that her team is entirely capable without her, although they do miss her skills.
In Solid State Society, it's stated that because they had to replace Motoko with Badass Normal Togusa, they had to shift the focus of the team to slightly more manageable cases, and expanded the team to compensate so they could cover several cases at once.
As far as this troper was able to determine from the movie, expansion of the team had already been in progress when the Major left, as exemplified by Azuma and Yano in the second season, and the changing focus of the organization was a deliberate decision done unrelated to her absence, as well. Also, there simply isn't a nationwide terrorist-related crisis going on all the time.
Kirika and Mirielle from Noir are assassins who regularly use bumbling male thugs for target practice. Most male antagonists in this series fall under the "bumbling thug" descriptor. When they go up against more elegant, dangerous, and skilled opponents, the opponents are almost always female..
There is a noncombatant male who pretty much has Mireille dancing to his tune, and gets her to get rid of his dangerous competition, who happens to be the show's Big Bad, and the person ultimately responsible of the death of Mireille's dead parents, however.
Averted nicely in Naruto. While there aren't as many female characters in the series, the ones that there are have the same overblown personalities and mixture of weakness and strength that the guys do. The most recent chapters also introduced characters who are noticeably darker than the rest of the cast, and they promise to have the same quirky and over the top characterizations as everyone else.
Comic Books
Scott Adams, the writer/artist of the comic strip Dilbert, has trouble including minorities in his central cast because he loves deeply-flawed characters, and knows that people write letters when the one visible member of a given group is dumb, a criminal, or lazy. He created Asok, an intern from India, as a workaround, as his flaw is naiveté and inexperience, things that are clearly temporary. He still got letters.
Adams also created a character named "Tina the Brittle Technical Writer", a woman with a very short fuse and very strong opinions on every subject, mostly negative. He was lambasted for stereotyping women. In response, he jokingly created Antina (antidote to Tina), a character he tried to make as completely non-stereotypical as possible, down to her muscles. He then received letters complaining he was stereotyping lesbians. As he put it in one of the books, "It appeared I could not win." Tina stayed in the strip but became something of a generic character and patsy.
Adams got around the similar issue of finding Acceptable Nationality Targets by inventing Elbonia, a backwards, mud-drenched Ruritania that is "foreign to all my readers". He described it as a "second world country; they have plenty of food, they just don't like it."
Speaking of "didn't work," doesn't Elbonia sound a little bit like Albania? (The "not-quite-in-Europe" material culture does a lot for that, too.)
That would also work for Armenia (elbow/arm ... geddit?)
In his commentary book "7 years of highly defective people" he insisted his editors do the coloring, and choose the worst times to add diversity to the cast. The strip he was commentating on was about a thieving security guard who was colored to be black.
Arguably the reason that Black Panther's African country of Wakanda should be lifting into the air and hovering far above the backwards, petty influence of all those... well, every other ethnicity there is... any day now.
The Wakandians seem pretty content to just let everyone else die horribly. They've cured cancer and AIDS but won't share the tech with anyone else for no given reason and during the Skrull Invasion their tech allowed them to detect the impostors, of course they never mentioned that whole "our plant is being invaded by shapeshifting aliens" thing to anyone.
They probably could have destroyed all the Skrulls, too. Dicks.
There was a time in the 80's when Marvel Comics' two flagship ensemble teams, the X-Men and Avengers, both had black female leaders. However, there's a reason why Storm caught on with readers and became a very popular character and Captain Ersatz Marvel (yes, that Captain Marvel) did not. Basically, the latter was a girl scout who was as close to being The Cape without actually wearing one, whereas the former actually had more than one dimension and is an interesting character in her own right.
What happened to Captain Marvel was Executive Meddling all the way. Mark Gruenwald, then the writer of Captain America, was also the editor of Avengers. He wanted Cap. A. to be the Avengers leader, by having Cap. M. be revealed as incompetent to lead. When Cap. M.'s writer (and creator of the character) wouldn't play ball, he was replaced and the Character Derailment went ahead.
A particularly common theme in comics is to have black scientists as well (much moreso than you would expect the ratio to be in real life), especially circa the 1970s or 80s, where it would likely have seemed ironic and well intentioned of the writers- Cyborg's parents (and his potential love interest at STAR Labs), Bumblebee of the Teen Titans, and more. Marvel examples include Thunderball (the ONLY black member of the universally idiotic thugs in The Wrecking Crew was the brilliant nuclear physicist), Vermin, and streetwise more standard-type geniuses like Hobie Brown, among others.
There's also Chimestro(Hood's go to science guy) and Deadly Nightshade from MODOK'S 11.
In an early Boodocks strip, Riley assumed that all white people are funny and intelligent. Not actually having met any white people until moving to Woodcrest, he stereotyped them based on sitcoms he watched.
Commercials
Used widely in kid-directed commercials. Picture this scenario: Two kids are having a race in an RC car commercial. As their two cars near the finish line, a third comes out of nowhere and beats them to the punch, doing flashy maneuvers the all the way. Mouths gaping, the two boys exchanges awestruck glances and the camera panels to the mystery racer. If you hadn't guessed already, yes, it turns out to be some random girl holding the controller.
Also works for minorities. Some white kid will be sitting around, wearing bland clothes, with a bland haircut, and looking horribly bored while holding a product. Then, with a burst of hip-hop, in sweeps the black kid, wearing trendy clothes with plenty of bling, and of course he's got the far superior version of the product! The white kid looks on with resigned, mournful envy as the black kid dances up a storm. No, really, Gogurt did this exact commercial, and slightly milder variations are quite popular, especially for food products.
Watch any commercial - be it for beer, cars, or anything else under the sun - where a man is for some reason in conflict with a female. See how many times the man wins versus how many times the woman wins. In the world of commercials, the best a man can do is somehow tie with the woman, unless he's teaming up with another woman.
If at any point the man says "Let's show you how the men do it" or any variation thereof, the chance of him even tying becomes zero. It's gotten to the point where this male troper is actually insulted by it and is starting to swear off products that think that's the best way to advertise themselves.
The strangest thing about this whole trend? These type of commercials, with incompetent, bumbling men being shown up by smirking, superior women are overwhelmingly for the more male-dominated fields perceived to be macho... beer, sports, and tools. It's essentially like shilling wine, theater, and arts & crafts with bikini babes.
Averted in a commercial for Oreos. A white cop and a black cop decide to see who can finish their stack of oreos first, and the white cop wins. Whether this was an intentional aversion is anyone's guess.
Given the use of 'Oreo' as a slang term, it just be just plain meta.
Also averted in two well-known British series of commercials - one for Nuts magazine (women can't do anything without "help" from men) and one for Flash cleaning products, which ran for years. In the Flash adverts, a man sees a woman scrubbing away at a stubbornly-dirty floor or cooker, offers to do it for her, and then uses Flash to clean without any effort. He then receives praise for his hard work, and doesn't tell the woman how he did it. The effect of both of these is irritating enough that it becomes clear why most advertisers don't do this.
Played ridiculously straight in this commercial for some sort of oven cleaning product. From the woman standing in the background with what can only be described as a scowl on her face, to the tagline "So easy...even a man could do it!", it's actually rather disgusting.
Said advert received 663 complaints from men and women (men claiming it portrayed them as idiots, women claiming it supported out-of-date stereotypes regarding women and the kitchen). Amazingly, they were not upheld - which sparked backlash from people saying an opposite advert would be shot down immediately.
The Daily Mail had a field day.
Film
In Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Jane Smith is professional and usually the one to be in control of the situation. John Smith makes bumbling mistakes and more than once seems to succeed purely on luck.
He is also not as cold-hearted as his wife. It appears she paid for that skill with her charisma and wisdom stats.
There is a partial aversion during their "bring down the house" fight scene in that, while Jane Smith is much more skilled when it comes to guns, the moment they get into a hand-to-hand fight, she's absolutely no match for him.
Occurs in the movie of Get Smart due to Values Dissonance. Agent 99 being the competent and experienced professional while Maxwell Smart was a blundering incompetent was originally a surprising and subversive twist... but now it just seems like this; in fact they seem to have made Maxwell more competent in order to compensate.
Welllll, in the original, 99 follows Smart around with puppy-dog eyes, obeying his every inanity. In the modern one, she's clearly the senior partner in the relationship, and she thinks he's a moron
A scene in the film Dogma depicts two angels condemning a room full of businessmen for their sins. Most of them are true scumbags for various reasons, but the sole female in the room is apparently so flawless (or at least not as much of a scumbag) that Loki has to point out that she didn't say "God bless you" when he sneezed. He still doesn't kill her, though.
If I recall, she was the secretary. It probably had more to do with not being a rich bastard than being a woman. Still valid, though.
A non-female example: the film U-571, where Eddie Carson, the black steward, winds up piloting a sub in combat situations with no training or previous experience.
Note that this might be Truth In Television; although not encouraged to do so, many WWII Navy stewards did fully qualify as submariners capable of serving in many capacities during battle stations.
Similarly, the case of Seaman Dorie Miller at Pearl Harbor; a black cook who dragged his commanding officer to safety, manned an AA gun and shot down several attacking aircraft under heavy fire.
If I remember correctly, this comes down to actual Navy requirements. Serving aboard a submarine as your post, you literally are required to learn everything about it, as well as how to do pretty much every job (except, you know, stuff like cook and chaplain).
Winston Zeddemore may not be the most brilliant of The Ghostbusters, but he is clearly the most professional and has the most common (and social) sense, without any of his coworkers' character quirks. He also never screws up in the ways Peter, Ray, or even Egon do. All the more blatant given that, in most adaptations, he's the Naive Newcomer.
Ironically, Winston was originally intended as the character with the most combat experience and all the best lines, but the writers thought they were having a "reverse discrimination" moment and decided to make him the character the others could play off of. Though this might not be about him being black but rather, because he worked for a living.
Averted in the cartoon version with Janine: when she occasionally has to don the Ghostbusters gear, she's naturally got bad aim and doesn't know how to use half the equipment since she's never been trained.
Pick any kids' sports movie, and there will be one female player on the team. This girl will never miss a shot or strike out on camera. (Arguably, this implementation began with the original Bad News Bears movie in the 1970s.)
This trope has carried over to video games, especially in webcomics.
The Bourne Series. All the important female characters are pretty unambiguously good; except for Bourne himself nearly all the important male characters are corrupt and/or outright sociopaths.
Julia Stiles' character does spent the first two films trying to kill Bourne, but only because she was given false information.
This is one of the rules set down for The Lone Ranger: all villains had to be white to avoid accusations of racism.
Sidney Poitier's most famous starring roles in Lilies of the Field, To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. For the most part, all these roles have Poitier playing men who are nearly perfect specimens of humanity except for a bit of righteous anger at injustice. Dinner is the most blatant with character being less a man than an demigod of perfection.
To be fair, this is a bit of Type Casting as Poitier is pretty much a demigod of perfection IRL, am I right?
And, also to be fair, Dinner was also an example of an necessary anvil. Poitier's character had to be an all around great person to drive the point.
Hilariously subverted in Sneakers. For most of the film, Poitier's character is his typical eloquent, composed, genteel family man. During the film's climactic confrontation, however, he and Dan Aykroyd's character are kidnapped by a pair of mooks. Poitier turns to Aykroyd, says "Hey, you know why they kicked me out of the CIA? My temper" and proceeds to beat the crap out of one of the mooks, and he screams "Motherfucker, mess with me and I split ya head!" Worth the price of admission.
To Sir With Love was criticised for saying that black people should be accepted in society - so long as they are educated and well-spoken.
Let's not forget that in In the Heat of the Night it turns out that Both Poitier and the Sheriff let their feelings cloud their judgment, with Poitier suspecting a man of murder purely because he was a racist
In the new Charlies Angels films, all the men are either buffoons, evil, secretly evil, or a disembodied voice on a speaker phone. Then again, all the women other than the Angels are also secretly evil.
Lampshaded in The Animal: Miles, the only black man employed at the airport, is constantly complaining that, because he's black, the others treat him as if he could do no wrong, and ignore anything he does - such as smoking in a federal building - that would prove otherwise.
Becomes a Chekhovs Gun when Miles claims to be the monster to keep the mob from killing the main character. The mob immediately disbands to avoid getting charged with a hate crime, and Miles stands there as they walk off, screaming about 'reverse racism'
Averted in Inside I'm Dancing: Rory is in a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy, which doesn't stop him being a bit of an asshole. But still, a pretty cool guy.
"Your only disability, Rory, is that you're an arsehole!"
In the future of Virtuosity, the prisons are filled to overflowing with white people (who are all, of course, white supremacists). In fact, Denzel Washington's character may be the only black guy in prison in the future. And he's a cop. And it was basically a bogus rap.
Averted in the live action Dragonball Evolution movie. The main bully Carey Fuller, who is of obvious black/African descent, displays not an inkling of positive or redeeming features. He has no qualms about destroying Goku's bike or trying to assault Goku at a party with his white, Asian, and mixed race followers.
Averted bizarrely in the original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). The evil gang is formed by an alliance of 4 ethnic gangs: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian.
Also averted in the Disney film Cheetah, where the three villains include one White guy, one Asian (Indian), and one African.
Literature
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time seems to have this at first glance: Half of the nations and organizations in that world are openly matriarchal, and in the rest the women are in control anyway. But it soon turns into what's almost a reversal, or even StrawFeminism, since all women in this world turn out to be both incompetent and jerkasses. It just bugs me.
You think the men are any better? Everyone in that world is an incompetent jerkass. It's like a crapsack world for intelligence. *tugs braid*
You know, he said in a lot of interviews that he puts a little of his wife into all of his female characters. If you assume he made all of the women like that intentionally... Makes you wonder what he really thought of her.
Of the four protagonists of Patrick Tilley's The Amtrack Wars, the two guys are pretty deeply flawed, get slightly better or a lot worse, and die. The two girls wind up more or less saints by the end, and live.
Subverted in the Discworld book Jingo, where 71-Hour Achmed tells Vimes "Truly treat all men equally. Allow Klatchians the right to be scheming bastards."
The Watch series has this as a running theme, especially in Men At Arms. Due to the speciesism that pervades Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari's demand that the Watch better represent the city's "ethnic" makeup means including a dwarf, a troll, and a werewolf on the Watch.
In Robinson Crusoe, the black man Friday is portrayed as nigh superhuman in virtue, physical condition and even intelligence (he learns English VERY quickly.) This is close to the idea of a Noble Savage and is also Crusoe's argument for the white man's burden.
Live Action TV
The seventh season of Red Dwarf introduced a female crewmember who quickly proved the most competent of any of them (not a challenge given the competition, granted...) They thankfully backed off this some in later episodes. It should be pointed out, however, that she came from an alternate universe where the Red Dwarf crew were all more competent than their "regular" universe counterparts. A recurring theme had Kochanski berating Lister for not being as competent as her Dave. However, there was a lot of implication that they were more competent because of her, so it still stands.
More importantly, the non-robot/computer crew of the Red Dwarf was previously composed of the two lowest ranking people on the ship, in addition to a life form evolved from Dave's cat. The Cat was not thought of too highly by the rest of the cat people either. Kochanski never had much competition.
A subversion was Holly from Series 3-5, played by Hattie Hayridge. The character admitted in one episode to being a "deranged, half-witted computer" and in another couldn't even count without banging her head on the screen.
Remember, though, that Holly in series 1 and 2 was played by Norman Lovett. She's stupid now because he was stupid then.
In the comedy Chalk, Suzy Travis is the sarcastic, intelligent straight man to the rest of the teaching department's idiotic fools - especially headmaster Mr Slatt. However, this is subverted in the second season as she slowly turns into Slatt herself.
Averted in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Sweet Dee is as flawed as everyone else.
This is particularly fun, as Sweet Dee is occasionally given to reprimanding the rest of the cast for being such idiots, or so immoral, in classic "level-headed female character" mode... then she goes off and does something equally idiotic and immoral, while clinging tenaciously to her moral high ground.
NewsRadio - the sole black character, Bill's co-anchor Catherine Duke, was by far the least ridiculous person at the station. Also the dullest, which is why few noticed her departure in the middle of the fourth season.
Dave and Lisa were also more or less normal, as well as more successful. Still, in one episode when Bill is listing the positive traits of all his coworkers, for Catherine he simply says, "You're a woman, and you're black, oh what I wouldn't give!"
The Office (USA): Even though Stanley and Darryl are clearly rude and obnoxious, Michael constantly ignores it for the cameras, fearing accusations of racism. The show is also pretty impressive when it comes to gender: the female characters are exactly as flawed as the male ones.
Pretty much any family sitcom involves a wife who is far more intelligent and level headed than her spouse. This usually leads to one or two episodes where the trend is reversed so the husband can be right at least once. This one pretty much goes back to The Honeymooners.
Although sometimes they make it so the wife is still right anyway because the husband starts flaunting the fact he was right and messes up again.
Averted in Dexter, where Hispanic female Lieutenant LaGuerta was promoted due to luck and political reasons. She's competent, is interested in justice and so on, but also ruthlessly political in her desire to advance her own career.
Heavily averted in the books, where she's impied to be deeply incompetent.
This troper started to feel a bit uncomfortable with the disdainful portrayal of the various minority characters in the books until she realized that they and, in fact, the rest of the characters were being viewed through Dexter's sociopathic filter. At which point she kicked herself for not seeing it sooner.
Western Animation
The Simpsons began its existence with Marge and Lisa being clearly smarter and more sensible than their male relatives. This was taken to the extreme in an episode where it was revealed that there was a "Simpson gene" for stupidity which only affected males (we don't mention that episode much, and the writers seem to have retconned it). As the series progressed, Marge developed her own idiotic habits, but so did everyone else in Springfield... save Lisa, who apparently absorbed every ounce of common sense and intelligence in the city. Of course, it didn't have anywhere else to go.
Says you. Lisa's Flanderization into a one-dimensional Soapbox Sadie makes this troper view her as the show's Wesley. The reason that she and her ideological cohorts are the only smart characters on the show is because the writers arrange it so that she's always right.
It's also been shown that Lisa...isn't a particularly nice person when things don't go her way. Remember the time she thought she and her bother killed Martin and tried to cover it up?
Not to mention when she became a vegetarian she couldn't handle that her family wern't, and proceded to shove her lifestyle choice down everyone else's throat and make them convert by ruining the BBQ. Also, she becomes an obnoxious fundamental atheist in the episode with that angel skeleton in the stone, sneering at her mother's faith.
And she was shown to be right about the angel skeleton, too. The writers just love Lisa.
She doesn't become an atheist, she is skeptical that an ANGEL SKELETON was found in her town. This episode seems not to be about Lisa being unusually smart, but the rest of Springfield being exceptionally gullible or dishonest (ie. a geneticist lying about the results of a bone sample test for no apparent reason).
Nothing fundamental about atheism, either.
Patty and Selma, probably the two least likable characters on the show, are also female, and are shown living pretty pathetic lives.
Carl was far and away the smartest of Homer's friends and pretty much never screwed up (although also hardly ever spoke). Lenny and Carl slowly became dimmer to make them into a comedy duo, and the two are now very much alike, but Carl is still notably smarter than Lenny...and can dunk like Jordan.
Dr Hibbert was originally the only competent person in Springfield until he went through Flanderization into a rich doctor who laughed inappropriately. Springfield police department brings us another example with Lou and this was even mentioned on one of the earlier season's DVD commentary. In Springfield, everyone is stupid unless they're Lisa or black. However, Dr. Hibbert has been increasingly shown as having less and less competency than we were initially believed, in one instance, showing signs of nervousness when the kids were about to reveal that someone in town was practicing medicine without a license. It was Homer.
His wife (also black) is implied to be an alcoholic in one episode.
Lampshaded in King of the Hill, where Peggy envisions herself as the suffering smart one but is actually far less sensible than Hank.
Averted with Kahn, Hank's Laotian neighbor, who from day one has been portrayed as a racist Jerk Ass. In the first episode they meet, Hank doesn't want to associate with him and Peggy accuses Hank of being a racist, causing Hank to remark, "What kind of country is this where you can only hate a man if he's white?"
Averted in Rugrats with Angelica, who is a conniving and bossy and usually gets her comeuppance, but played straight with Susie, the black girl and paragon of perfection.
The major reason for the general fandom rejection of Lola Bunny in Space Jam, who aside from being the only new character didn't follow any of the usual humorous slapstick conventions. For instance, late in the film, Bugs pushes her out the way when one of the Monstars is about to squash her, as though she, unlike all the other toons and even Bugs himself afterwards, will not just get flattened like a pancake or some other temporary cartoon injury that is easy to recover from. Even a human character in the movie gets flattened and does not receive permanent damage.
Babs Bunny avoided this, although her style of humor had always been more in dialogue than slapstick. Tiny Toon Adventures in general has done a decent job of splitting the idiocy between the male and female halves of the cast; again, it helps when there's more than one girl.
Illustrated quite well in The Fairly Oddparents. Although (much like The Simpsons) the emphasis on humor quickly turned the entire cast into idiots, viewers were constantly reminded that Cosmo and Timmy's dad were far stupider than their female counterparts Wanda and Mrs. Turner.
Not so much with Timmy's mom, since they use her to get a lot of cheap jokes about being an old woman, and she's consistently portrayed as being as incompetent as her husband. Wanda's naggyness is also a female stereotype that gets played up frequently.
She was completely Flanderized, perhaps more than anyone else. She used to hand out rather sensible advice on wishes and would tell Cosmo he's being dumb, but now she's just nagging all the time. Uh...
To be fair, most bricks are smarter than Cosmo.
With Danny Phantom, Butch Hartman was able to do it all over again with Danny's parents. In the early episodes, though goofy, Jack was portrayed as a visionary ghost-hunter whose over-enthusiasm often got in the way of common sense, while Maddie was soft-spoken and more of his assistant. By halfway into the first season, it completely flipped: Maddie became the bold action-oriented commanding ghost hunter, while Jack could barely even point a rifle in the right direction.
Positive Discrimination was also regularly expressed by Sam, constantly the voice of reason to the perpetually Idiot Ball-holding Danny and Tucker, and Jazz, the perfect student in contrast to her Book Dumb little brother.
Danny eventually averts this for the most part come Season Three through Character Development. If anything, he's only Book Dumb moments occur as an excuse to give Sam a reason to nag, an act that is all but pointless by that point.
In Yin Yang Yo, the two main leads are basically girl and boy versions of each other. Yin is the overly girlish girl who likes ponies and anything pink and naturally is the more studious, mature, and level-headed of the two. Yang is a crass, crude-humor spouting blue bunny who likes boyish things like monster trucks, mindless video games, fighting anything that moves, and not studying. Also the more likely to receive physical slapstick. Once again, the three shows share writers and directors, so not much of a surprise.
In Atomic Betty, Paloma is a token minority with more powers than the rest of the cast (good guys and villains alike), no flaws whatsoever, genius IQ, probably enough psychic powers to take over the world, but since her role is to be a token minority she's like 1% of the show, and never gets to beat up any bad guys, save the world, gets any substantial adventures of her own, or even get to do some comment on Betty's adventures. This troper fully expects Paloma was added in to fullfill some obscure ethnic quota requirement without actually having a role in the adventures of the white (or occasionally green) people. Walt Disney (the man not the company) would be proud...
Gwen of Ben10 is generally portrayed as smarter, more competent, and all around better than Ben, despite Ben being the main character. Culminates in the TV Movie, in which Gwen is portrayed as selfless and Ben as selfish respectively. Riiiight...
Don't forget the episode "Gwen 10", where Gwen is instantly better with the Omnitrix.
And when it's time to hand out An Aesop, Ben's always the one it's handed to (or beat over the head with). Despite Gwen almost always having just as big a part in her arguments with Ben as he did (being insulting, condescending, shrill, and, well, argumentative), no one ever seemed to express that this might be a bad thing, not even with a "catch more flies with honey" type thing.
In Alien Force, Gwen's attitude is toned down.
However, in some ways it seems to have been replaced with a more subtle form, where Ben and Kevin can needle each other, she can needle them, but very very few barbs ever get aimed at her. Her powers also come with little to no limitations or drawbacks such as Ben has to deal with from the Omnitrix. Gwen getting preferential authorial treatment is just a lot less noticeable since she's not being a complete bitch all the time.
In Daria, the two major African-American kid characters at Lawndale High, Jodie and Mack, seem to be the only ones outside a handful of others who have intelligence and integrity enough to earn Daria's respect.
Jodie often calls attention to this fact, usually by complaining about how hard she has to work to keep up the expectation.
Subverted in The Proud Family when Penny dates Johnny, a wheel-chair bound boy, out of pity. However, it turns out that Johnny is a very rude and horrible person who uses his disability to his advantage to make people do things for him. Eventually, Penny has enough and tells him to take a hike.
Another subversion is when Penny joins the football team. The coach reluctantly puts her in the game after attempting to put in everyone else, like his waterboy son. Everything seems to follow the aforementioned case of the single girl in a team, including Penny being single-handedly responsible for her team's comeback...and the she fails to catch what would have be the game winning touch down and cries. She still convinces the boys that she can play, though.
Foxxy Love of Drawn Together is consistently portrayed as the smartest, most moral character on the show (though that isn't saying much). She is even referred to in one episode as being "the only person in the house who isn't completely retarded". In contrast, the show's white characters (Hero, Clara, and Toot) are fair game for all kinds of abuse.
Also subverted, in that she plays up absolutely every other stereotype of a black woman. So Yeah.
Her more responsible nature seems to come from her originator in Josie And The Pussycats... who might also be an example of this trope.
Sealab 2021 invokes this trope with Dr. Quinn, in order to mock it.
Averted with Genki Girl Frida Suez of El: Tigre. She is just as mischievous and misguided as Manny, if not more so. In the same vein as Babs, she also suffers double the amount of painful-looking slapstick than her male co star.
In Wolverine and the X-Men, when Wolverine is unconscious after braving a fire to save a little girl, the little girl's parents want to help him (risking their whole family), but another member of the group wants to turn him in to the mutant registration forces. Fair enough. The little girl's parents are also a mixed race couple and the other guy is white. Okay, fine. Except the mixed-race couple are toned, young, attractive, and wearing fashionable clothes, while the white guy is fat, middle-aged, balding, and wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts. Successful mix of Positive Discrimination and an Acceptable Target.
Though this sort of thing was actually averted in the original X-Men cartoon. The anti-mutant bigots were shown to include people of all races, which goes to show that nothing brings people of different races and creeds together quite like finding an even smaller minority to gang up on.
Barbie in A Christmas Carol has Barbie's Black Best Friend Christi playing a living saint while Barbie is in the role of The Grinch.
Played with and then mocked in a Robot Chicken sketch where they play a skit once, then play it with the races reversed. Then they do something completely unrelated to the previous two skits. Each is bookened by a scientist asking what the audience feels about the skits, then concluding something completely nonsensical.
Other
In the Lego series Bionicle, each Toa team has only one female on it, the main three so far being Gali, Nokama and Hahli. In each case they are the least flawed and the wisest (and in Gali's case, most agile) members of their teams. Particularly noticeable in Legends Of Metru Nui in which each Toa is given a major character flaw which they must overcome to unlock their individual mask powers, such as Vakama's lack of confidence and Matau's inability to stop and think before rushing in. Not only is Nokama's flaw relatively small (not admitting when she's wrong), it is only referenced once and she overcomes it very early on, extremely quickly.
Back in the mid-90s, the US Department of Justice once did a study regarding child support and just who was (and who wasn't) making their payments. What they found out was that almost 78% of non-custodial fathers paid their child support on time and in full. The percentage of non-custodial mothers who did the same? 41%. But you only ever heard about deadbeat dads, because the absolute numbers were far higher. Of course, that's often believed to be Positive Discrimination at work in its own right - mothers get primary custody a large majority of the time, which would seem to imply that the judicial system is biased towards giving it to them.
Alternatively, the judicial system is unbiased and simply reflects an underlying tendency for a better result to be achieved when the mother gets custody.
Women receive shorter sentences than men for the same crime pretty much everywhere. (In Spain, the law literally says that domestic violence by women only gets half the punishment.) Even under shari'a law, a woman who renounces Islam is imprisoned until she agrees to become Muslim again; a man who renounces Islam is put to death.
Um... shari'a law? The one where being raped is a capital offense? I don't think that's such a great example. As for Spain, that's probably an outgrowth of negative discrimination because women aren't seen to be as strong and therefore can't do as much damage.
Which matters... why? Whether you build a bomb and blow up a building or build a bomb and try to blow up a building but it turns out to be a dud, you still tried to blow up a building. How successful you are shouldn't have anything to do with your punishment.
Though I can't speak for the other troper, I'm not sure the statement itself indicates a support of the reduced penalty, but rather what kind of racism is at play. Both positive and negative discrimination can have all sorts of side effects. Such as being able to phone it in on subjects you're considered predestined to fail at, while having to work double time to meet the impossible standards of a supposed innate talent.
On the flip side, women receive LONGER sentences than men for child abuse and neglect because they are supposed to be more 'nuturing'... Law is full of double standards.
Where have you heard that? As far as this troper is aware, women who kill their own newborns are considered to have committed a lesser offence, at least in Canada. Though this may have been overturned more recently.
Destiny's Child's "Bills, Bills, Bills", is about a woman who thinks her boyfriend should be paying for "things [his] money should be handling". Among his other sins are driving her car without filling up the tank, and asking to borrow money. Despite openly admitting she's only dating the guy for the money, the singer is supposed to be sympathetic. The chorus is her listing her bills he should be paying. She also complains about him using her credit card. Strangely, if a guy was complaining about a woman maxing out his card and not being able to support him, he'd be seen as sexist.
You triflin', good for nothing type of brother
Silly me,why haven't I found another
A baller, when times get hard he's the one to help me out
Instead of a scrub like you who don't know what a man's about
Oddly, This Troper first heard the song as covered by Jonathan Coulton and assumed it was about a mooching sibling/friend, and thought it was a fair call if the guy was going to be running up his phone bill and using up all his gas. Put either the singer or the subject in an opposite gender and it really does put a different slant on it.
