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

Guess who's the main character.

Advertisement:

No matter how diverse a show's cast or how positive its portrayal of minorities, the lead character will almost always be a conventionally heterosexual, Caucasian, vaguely Christian, and often American male. Common wisdom in the Westernnote And by Western, we mean countries from the both the Anglosphere and Western European ones. entertainment industry is that a show or film needs a lead character that the target demographic can identify with. At least in the target of "Caucasian men", that despite being a diverse country, are still a majority, especially considering the same creators of content are mostly Caucasian men, and some think they are more "Identifiable", at least in places where they are majority as in the same country and more "profitable", so this is usually an Enforced Trope. The Caucasian Male Lead is often The Hero.

Advertisement:

You may be surprised to learn that this trope has less to do with Western bias (though that can still be prevalent, make no mistake) and more to do with courting the international dollar. In the United States, for example, you may be more likely to see female, minority, and LGBT leads in TV shows, where the viewership is mostly domestic. But in big-budget blockbuster films, such actors don't do nearly as well in international markets. Depending on the country, LGBT characters might be banned or require a higher rating, and female or minority leads might upset social norms. As a result, Western studios often play it safe by casting a plain white male as the lead.

Adaptations aren't safe either; even if the main character is explicitly a person of color, they are often subjected to Race Lifts in TV or film so that there will be a white guy in the lead role. And if they were gay, expect them to be turned straight or have their sexuality downplayed as much as possible. Another common tactic is for an adaptation or historical piece to focus on a white male who played a minor role in the original story, then overblow his importance so that he's the lead.

Advertisement:

Tropers are reminded that tropes are not always bad. Many works with white male leads have been praised for their positive portrayals of minority characters. And of course it's a vicious cycle of investors who want to put their money in a sure thing and studios who want to have something to point at to seem like they know what's going to "sell" to their Target. It is also due to self-insertion, whether from the same creators, writers or producers who are mostly Caucasian men in Hollywood; there's no one group to blame.

Compare Girl-Show Ghetto and Minority Show Ghetto (which this trope is intended to avoid), Ridiculously Average Guy, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Compare and contrast Mukokuseki, making characters racially ambiguous so that multiple demographics can relate to them. Unless a work is consciously avoiding it, he is often the leader of a Token Trio or Five-Token Band. If the one white person is not the lead character, then he's the Token White.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Advertising

The leader of the Five-Token Band The Burger King Kids Club Gang is a blond white boy named Kid Vid.

Film

Literature

Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

Magic: The Gathering: In Magic's earlier years, the Weatherlight was crewed by a diverse bunch of people - men and women, with many skin tones, and even including elves, minotaurs, and cat-people. But who is their leader? That would be Commander Gerrard Capashen, a light-skinned human male. And he gets extra discomfort points for being the product of Urza's bloodline project, meaning that he's genetically perfect for fighting the Phyrexian invasion. Later on in the story, the planeswalker Jace Beleren - another light-skinned male human - was introduced and poised to be at the center of many of the story's most important plots, including the Eldrazi invasion of Zendikar and the Maze crisis on Ravnica. In recent years he was chosen to be blue mana "representative" of the Gatewatch, an Avengers-style alliance of planeswalkers dedicated to protecting the multiverse from extraplanar threats; and, like before, he's had a central role in solving each problem that the Gatewatch has thus confronted.



Theater

In RENT, despite its racially and sexually diverse cast and high praise by the LGBT community, the two central characters are still the straight and white Mark and Roger (Ho Yay between them notwithstanding). While Mark is explicitly Jewish, Roger's race isn't discussed but he's usually cast as white due to his grunge rock style.

Video Games

Web Animation

Chris from Bravest Warriors is the only white character in the show, and also the main protagonist and leader of the group.

Dave from Satina Wants a Glass Of Water...sort of.

Web Comics

In The Order of the Stick, Tarquin has one blind spot in his Genre Savvy dominance: he believes the hero of the story is Elan (white male), when in fact Elan is part of an ensemble and the de facto protagonist is Roy (black male). A large part of Tarquin's Villainous Breakdown is that other characters are overshadowing Elan, whom he insists should be the hero to his Big Bad—and according to Word of God, it's no accident that Elan and Tarquin both are straight white males while the characters sidelining Elan include a black man, a woman, an individual outed as genderqueer in that very piece of Word of God, and a Latino guest star. Tarquin not only can't stand losing control of his carefully-crafted narrative, he can't stand the idea that the character who best fits the White Male Lead mold isn't the lead. He pretty much just assumes that he's the leader in his own group for the same reason, even though it's clear to the reader that he's not. note His group doesn't seem to actually have a leader, with his non-white (and in 2 cases non-human) friends only playing along to the extent that they feel like it and otherwise doing their own thing.

Web Original

Western Animation