The Token Black Guy

Token Minority is a character designed to get more minority groups into the plot. This serves several purposes:

• Allows the producers of the show to broaden the appeal of the show by giving more viewers protagonists they can identify with.
• Is useful for bringing in discussions of racial issues, gender issues or homophobia into the plot.
• Helps the producers feel a little better about using a Scary Minority Suspect in every other case.
• Allows the producers to make race jokes related to minority without any shame.
• Allows the producers to avoid criticism from minority groups.
• Fulfills the executives' desire for the show to be more ethnically respectful.

Sometimes, the Token Minority will be glaringly out of place for their locale (i.e. seemingly the only black person in Vermont, the only gay person in the construction yard).

Often, the producers will go out of their way to avoid racial issues regarding their Token Minority. For example, Warrick Brown in CSI rarely or ever discusses race issues, and the producers chose a Fatal Flaw which was more emblematic of Las Vegas in general than of blacks — gambling addiction. In this case, the Token Minority may either be in the show to broaden its appeal without risking angering any media watchdogs with stereotypical depictions of minorities... or it may be an example of race-blind casting, and not tokenism at all.

If a character is of two minority groups, this is referred to cynically in the industry as a Twofer (see Twofer Token Minority). This is quite common on news programs, which often have one white male and one black or Asian female newscaster - note that for the purposes of this trope women are a "minority", when in fact they make up a small majority in the population of most industrial countries. This logical inconsistency is usually attributed either to the historically male-dominated society in which women are often still perceived (by both sexes) to be newcomers, or to a general feminist hypersensitivity in areas where little sexism still remains, or both. Although it's hard not to snicker at the concept that there's "little sexism" in the news when female anchors are regularly fired at the first sign that they're aging, while male newscasters seemingly live forever. Sexism in the news industry is rampant.

If the opposite gender of this minority appears in an episode, they're almost always a love interest.

In Britain, the Token Minority is just as likely to be South Asian as Afro-Caribbean. With the increasing number of Central and Eastern Europeans in the UK, they're slowly starting to turn up as characters other than The Illegal and criminals (Coronation Street now has a Polish character). It may take a while before we start seeing them in as police officers, though.

The Super Hero equivalent is Captain Ethnic.

To look on the bright side, at least he isn't an Ethnic Scrappy.

A common subversion seen with many minority-laden casts of late is a Token White guy/girl. If the cast is that way for the wrong reasons, it's a Five Token Band.

The cheapest version of this trope is Informed Judaism: You get to feel like the character is a minority, but there's absolutely no difference between her and her white, presumably Jesus-loving friends.

In historical fiction they will often be Black Vikings.

Black Best Friend (But Not Too Black) is probably the most common (US) subtrope.

In terms of film, equally well parodied/referenced by the "Token Black Guy" in Not Another Teen Movie. Named Malik Token, the Genre Savvy token helpfully explains the joke to the audience by introducing himself as the person that stays out of conversations and says "Damn!", "Shit!", and "That is whack!" At a party later in the film, he sees another black guy, played by Sean Patrick Thomas, Token Minority from Cruel Intentions, and tells him that he was at the party first and the other man apologizes and leaves the party.

• Arguably, Malik's Crowning Moment Of Awesome was when he got to say, "Damn, that shit is whack!"

After Star Wars Episode IV became a blockbuster, numerous people noticed that an entire galaxy of humans were all white. (Which was not entirely true; it was just that the main characters were all white.) Episode V introduced Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, the Token Minority Black.

• Samuel L. Jackson in the prequels may also be a example of this, as his character serves as little more than a background character until Revenge of the Sith (excluding his excellent use in the Clone Wars shorts)
• He got a little screen time for Bad Ass purposes in Attack of the Clones. A little, but it was there.
• The fact that he gets little screen time in the first film is hardly surprising given that he's only in it because he said on TV that he'd "play third stormtrooper from the left" if it meant he could be in Star Wars and was thus cast rather late.
• One might argue that casting Temuera Morrison, who is a Maori, as Jango Fett and by retroactive consequence, his clone Boba Fett and every single stormtrooper in every Star Wars movie reduces all other characters in the series (black, white or green) to token minorities by sheer weight of numbers.

While the 2006 historical film Flyboys was already heavily criticised for its historical inaccuracies relating to its World War I setting, one of the more amusing ones came from the film's fictional Token Minority, Eugene Skinner, a black boxer who joined the squadron to 'pay back' his adopted homeland. Mainly because the end of the movie showed a picture of the real-life squadron which was composed of exactly zero minorities. A rare moment where a film actually seems proud to reveal when it Did Not Do The Research. The Other  points out that the film confuses the Lafayette Escadrille with the Lafayette Flying Corps with whom Eugene Bullard (the real person Skinner was based on) actually flew.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TokenMinority