This Troper is the only black dude in his group of otherwise all white friends.

This Troper remembers an especially bad case in which his textbook featured a scene consisting entirely of ''6 minority representatives, smiling while they compared answers to their math homework''.

A group of people without a white person present? Yeah, like that ever happens!

The above would actually describe this troper's highschool clique (except without the smiling. Hate maths). Seriously, there's nothing incredible about it. At least, not where this troper lives...

Maybe it's that it was six DIFFERENT minority representatives, instead of say six asians or six hispanics. If that's the case, then it is definitely more of a "look at our minorities" business.

Still not such a big deal. Minorities in white-majority schools tend to hang together, not in separate tiny groups.

Not necessarily. In this troper's school, there are groups that are mostly East Asian or mostly black rather than it just being all one big group.

ThisTroper's schoolbooks ALWAYS had a Token Handicapped kid as well.

Umm... Sorry, but that's actually a FiveTokenBand.

This Troper's class is all girls, except for one guy.

This troper had a class that was all guys except for her.

This troper's class from 5th grade to 9th grade was all Jewish, and then there was one Hispanic girl and one Asian guy. And then her best friends outside of school consisted of me (Jewish), an Asian girl, and then the token Christian white girl.

Double-triple-reverse subver-straight. The French suburbs are made up of a huge majority...of immigrant minorities. My whole family is white, a minority within these majority of minorities, but we're all of (mostly) Algerian descent, thus actually in the majority (or minority). ''However'' I act as "white" as I technically am (my whole family is pretty "white" in behavior too) even though I am not, and I am in fact the "whitest" in my entire family behavior-wise. Got it?

There was a single black kid in this troper's graduating high school class. We had several Indian, Asian, and Hispanic kids, as well as a few British immigrants, but he was the only black kid in our grade.

At ThisTropers high school, there were maybe six kids who were a mix of african american and native american. Oh, and they were all ''related''.

Only Jewish kid in every school since...well, since I started elementary school

I can top that: since PRESCHOOL, I have been the only Jew.

This Troper went to elementary school in a fairly homogeneous part of town. She remembers specifically one instance in the classroom in which the students received surveys, and when the race question came up the teacher said, "Everybody mark 'white', except for Whitney. You can mark 'black'." Here's the kicker: The Troper in question is Hispanic.

My circle of friends is made up of all minorities.Somehow, all of the kids in my grade whoa re minorities decided to hang out and decided to include me. Although, I would be their token...

This troper currently goes to a private Baptist school. Ignoring the fact that he's Buddhist, almost everyone is black or a darker skin tone then him except for him and two other kids (who are white). He is biracial, but appears to be Puerto Rican and identifies as so (to be fair three other kids are the same mix as him but their darker in shade).

This troper has gotten to watch several people go through being 'accepted' after coming out--because it meant their family and friends could make a show of how tolerant they were by showing off their newly-discovered token minority. On the other side, I've also got to watch a few of that type try to build a FiveTokenBand for the same purpose--and the worst part seemed to be a total ''lack'' of awareness that they were treating them like tokens instead of ''people''. Talk about man's inhumanity to man...

A non-real life example. For two years I--and I'm not naming myself, though you can check the edit history of you really care--planned on having a Hispanic main character for my novel...but I was afraid it wouldn't feel authentic, and I would be attacked by the Hispanic culture for making a character so obviously fake. I was afraid he would be seen as exploitative...even though I actually just wanted to decrease discrimination by having a non-white hero in a HighFantasy novel, a la {{Earthsea}}. This was compounded by my fear that instead of making him flawed, like all good characters, I would worry too much and make him completely flawless to avoid looking like a racist. Finally--just recently, as a matter of fact, I gave up and made the character's race unclear, changing his name as well.

And yes, I know I'm a coward.

Considering Hispanics are not a single race but an ethnic identity heavily tied to real-world history, it would have been impossible to have a FantasyCounterpartCulture without falling back on stereotypes. But besides that, this troper of color thinks positive discrimination is far more offensive than an interesting, well-rounded character with ups and downs, whose race is incidental to any of that.

My art class is all girls except for this one token male. He's a cute one, too.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only Filipino in my school, but I'm also the only male second violinist in the good orchestra.

Correction, only Filipino in any of my classes. I think.

when Ilived in St. Louis I was the TokenWhiteBoy due to the school only having 5 white kids counting me

This troper is currently attending alternative school, due to a failing math and science grade. I'm one of four fully white chicks attending the school. Usually, I'm in the ''majority'', and now, ironically, am in the ''minority''. Besides that fact, there's only four female students in the entire 8th Grade Academic Class. The rest are male. And I'm always being targeted specifically, for acting white. I AM WHITE!!!!!

This troper tends to be a two-way token: she's the only black person in a group (of white people) or the only light-skinned, biracial person (in a group of black people). Yes, her racial status seems to change (because the other people said it does) according to whom she is around. She doesn't understand how that works, either.

In this troper's drumline, she is both the token female ''and'' the token Jew.