| abstract
| - 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 (or she often will but will simply not get public credit for it, but since she's so selfless she doesn't really care), 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. The sad irony? The creators usually want the audience to be proud of or in awe of this character; instead, the character is just so perfect that she's hated by the audience (and sometimes in-universe too) with all the fires of Hell. Though this trope is more common with racial minorities, women, and sometimes gays and bisexuals, it is sometimes applied to disabled people as well. This often leads to Disability Superpower, Handicapped Badass, Idiot Savant, Inspirationally Disadvantaged, and other tropes that, done wrong, will imply that disability actually makes a person superior to non-disabled people. Unlike with other minorities, it has not yet become generally recognized that disabled people can be portrayed just about any way non-disabled ones can be. In an effort to compensate for a history of stigmatizing the disabled by using them as Morality Pets, objects of pity, or the subjects of miraculous cures, writers will often completely overshoot the mark, going from "inferiority" to "superiority" -- and skipping "equality" altogether. 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. Of course, this trope, just like all tropes by their nature, has its own inertia, and thus adding more X doesn't always solve the problem. Instead, all of X will still be unfailingly more competent and better than the others, essentially making the Unfortunate Implications of "X is superior in every way to Y" explicit. 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. 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. The issue of Positive Discrimination can lead to a case of Unpleasable Fanbase. On one hand, lack of Positive Discrimination, as stated above, puts the writer in danger of being called racist, sexist, etc. just because they gave the Token Minority something as heinous as a common flaw. On the other hand, it puts the discriminatee in danger of becoming the Creator's Pet, since he/she will often be seen as a Mary Sue or Marty Stu in the eyes of the audience that is blatantly shilled one too many times and it leads to major Unfortunate Implications that someone from X isn't equal, but superior and can do no wrong. Even worse, in Real Life it tends to set the victim up for a dizzying fall: if they are assumed to be so hypercompetent, then their making even the slightest mistake will be seen as disgrace or, worse, hypocrisy. (To quote Bill Cosby: "If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. But if a black man does it, then it's the whole damned Negro race.") If a Lady Land is a utopian paradise, it's probably running on this trope. Contrast with Closer to Earth. Almost all instances of You Go, Girl! are this, when women are displayed as superior to their male competitors in sports or other traditionally male domains. The Innocent Bigot may display Positive Discrimination, but in this case it will be Lampshaded as a bad thing. You Are a Credit to Your Race is a related trope. Taking the polar opposite tack leads to Mighty Whitey. A very frequent character trait of the Gamer Chick. Examples of Positive Discrimination include:
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