Examples of Race Lift where the exact race of the individual was in question to begin with, especially in the case of historical figures.
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Comic Books
- Carlos Ezquerra originally designed the title character of Judge Dredd to be Hispanic; other artists drew him as either white or black in early issues. Since these issues were black and white, nobody noticed. After the series began appearing in color, Dredd was consistently drawn as a white man. In the 2023 storyline "One-Eyed Jacks", it was revealed that his clone father, Judge Eustice Fargo, had a black grandmother, Detective Eartha Fargo, which presumably makes him mixed race.
- Jubilee has also been through this - canonically Chinese-American but often drawn by artists who didn't get the memo. Since about the mid-nineties she has been more consistently depicted as firmly Chinese in appearance.
- In Marvel’s Eternals, Phastos was Black when he first appeared in the 1985 miniseries, but white when he appeared in the 2008 series. He’s Black again in the 2021 series, but it’s now canon that Eternals can change their appearance, race and gender when they resurrect.
- Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths, Ocean Master was Aquaman's fully human half-brother, the son of Thomas Curry and his second wife, Maureen. Post-Crisis, he was half-Inuit, half-Atlantean (but still Aquaman's half-brother, since Aquaman's parentage had also changed). In most adaptations and the New 52, he is white but is also a full Atlantean, meaning he went from a member of a real minority group to a fictional one.
- Black Adam has always been drawn with light skin despite being associated with Ancient Egypt and coming from a (fictional) country in the Sinai Peninsula. In Shazam! (2012), and a few times since, Teth-Adam looks appropriately Middle Eastern without his powers, but when he transforms he still looks white. In fact, he looks more like a regular white guy than he did before since they got rid of his Pointy Ears, Unusual Eyebrows and vaguely demonic features.
Fan Works
- There's some controversy in the Glee fandom regarding how to portray Blaine in fanfiction since his race has never been mentioned in Canon. Some fans think that since Darren Criss, who plays Blaine, is half-Filipino and nothing has been said to the contrary, one should assume that Blaine is too and write him accordingly to avoid
Unfortunate Implications. Others think that since Blaine hasn't been expressively stated to be biracial, Artistic License dictates it's fine to portray him however you want, whether that be Caucasian, Filipino, or mixed-race. - Due to the intentionally few character descriptions and the audio-only nature of the show, Welcome to Night Vale fan works vary on the races of characters (except Carlos, who is Latino).
- In the Total Drama Comeback Series, Noah (an Ambiguously Brown character from the source material) mentions at one point that he's Indonesian. Word of God would late come out and say that the character is canonically Indian.
- In RWBY, the mukokuseki animesque art-style and Constructed World makes it impossible to pin most characters as one ethnicity or another. RWBY: Scars goes for a Fantasy Counterpart Culture approach, to a degree. For example, everything about Blake, from her character design to her real name ("Hozuki Blake"), imply she's at minimum the equivalent of half-Japanese.
- Yang and her half-sister Ruby in White Noise are explicitly at least half-Asian. In RWBY canon they look Mukokuseki and come from a Constructed World, but Yang has a Chinese name like her father Taiyang.
- As Peter Parker inherited his powers from his parents in born of hell('s kitchen) instead of gaining them through spider bite, he certainly can't be called a mutate in this iteration. He would be more akin to a mutant, but there's no indication of others mutants existing in the continuity so it stays ambiguous.
- Darth Nihilus's race is left ambiguous in the Star Wars Legends continuity, although it's known that he wore his hair in dreadlocks (a hairstyle associated with African-American culture in real-life). Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger does away with the ambiguity and depicts Nihilus's human self as a black man.
Film — Animated
- Keith in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents doesn't get a description beyond "the stupid-looking kid", but early concept art
◊ for the Sky Cinema animated adaptation showed him as white and blond. When Himesh Patel was cast in the role, the design was reworked to make him South Asian.
Film — Live Action
- Oliver Stone's World Trade Center includes, among other real life people, a minor character based mostly off a real man who happened to be black. Unfortunately, when they were doing research, no one in the production thought to check this man's race, and they cast a white actor. After the movie came out they were informed about it, and Stone apologized.
- Another Oliver Stone example, Alexander, has Bactrian/Sogdian noblewoman Roxane played by Rosario Dawson, who's of complex mixed ancestry including African, latina, Native American and white. It's not certain exactly what Roxane looked like, but as she was from the vicinity of northern Afghanistan or its immediate neighbors, a reasonable guess might be like a modern Tajik.
- In the Harry Potter books, the centaur Firenze is described as blonde haired and with the hind body of a palomino horse which are light colored. In the movies he's portrayed by a black actor and his appearance is that of a grey colored centaur.
- Although Sulu's exact ethnicity was never made clear in Star Trek: The Original Series, he was played by the Japanese-American George Takei and there are hints in a few episodes that Sulu also has Japanese ancestry. Meanwhile in the reboot, Sulu was played by John Cho, who is Korean-American. The casting was a minor controversy until Takei himself gave his blessing, as the character of Sulu had been intended to represent all Asian people.
- Queen of the Damned: Possibly both the King and Queen Of The Damned. While only Enkil's statue is seen in the film, he is quite clearly a white man. And while Akasha was the queen of Kemet (ancient Egypt) of six thousand years ago, the character was from Uruk before marrying into Enkil's throne. So she'd be middle eastern, but she's played by a black actress (Sub-Saharan descent). However, even the books are pretty vague about this, as Akasha's pale white skin has nothing to do with her race, but the fact that vampires lose their pigmentation the older they are. No matter what race or skin color they were in their human lives, they are both pale white as a statue now.
Literature
- Discworld: Advertisements for Captain Eightpanther's Travellers' Digestives, seen in The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide and the ephemera that comes with the stamps, shows a label that's a pastiche of 19th century British advertising, featuring a Victorian-looking naval officer with muttonchop whiskers, presumably intended to be the captain himself. The only appearance of the biscuits in the books was in The Colour of Magic, where they were part of Twoflower's provisions, which coupled with Eightpanther's name structure suggests he should probably be Agatean (that is, Asian). This may or may not be an in-universe example.
Mythology and Religion
- Jesus is mostly portrayed as a white person in media, though the Gospels are clear that he was from the Middle East. This is in short due to the media in question being made by white people. Jesus has been given different races depending on the congregation, including African and Asian, because always portraying his "real" ethnicity is seen as less important than identifying him with the local context. To some extent it's thus similar to the concept of Colorblind Casting because it's not really about changing his race.
- Same thing with his mother, the Virgin Mary. Not only is she portrayed as being multiple races (depending on the congregation), but she always conforms to the then-current ideals of feminine beauty in that culture, presumably because Beauty Equals Goodness.
- A strange case in Christian art history is St. Maurice (Mauricius or Mauritius), an Egyptian Roman soldier. The earliest depictions of him from the Middle East and elsewhere just have him look like the locals. But in the 13th century, he began to be depicted as a black African man in European depictions, pointedly different from the usual mold, because people erroneously thought his name was linked to the "Moors", a term whose meaning itself had mutated over the centuries, originally referring to North Africans such as Berbers but then as a generic term for Arabs, Muslims and/or Sub-Saharan "pagan" Africans, ultimately with the connotation of dark skin (as in Spanish moreno). Some medieval depictions of a black St. Maurice with curly/puffy hair, pitch black skin and even red lips even appear to prefigure the convention of Blackface which properly developed centuries later. But the closest ethnic group today to St. Maurice's own is probably the Copts, the most direct descendants of the Egyptians of antiquity, and he's understandably big in the Coptic churches. So he may as well have looked like Rami Malek, for instance.
Newspaper Comics
- Dilbert has the character of Asok, the naive young work experience intern who isn't even getting paid for what he does. Asok was originally intended to be an East Asian character to lampshade his ethnicity, its reputation for diligent conscientious hard work, and how this eventually becomes corrupted by contact with Americans like Wally and the corrosive effect of working at a succession of nonsensical non-jobs for the Pointy-Haired Boss. Unfortunately, the monochrome nature of newspaper publication meant this subtle point was lost (Asok's face and hands do become darker in the colour reprints) and the character was taken to be a white man with an odd name.
Video Games
- Cyberpunk 2077: In the original tabletop game, Johnny Silverhand is potrayed as a fair-skinned blonde from Texas, who was based on David Bowie, but his ethnicity/race was never specified. In the video game, his Ink-Suit Actor is Keanu Reeves, who's of Chinese and Native Hawaiian ancestry. It's not the case of Diversifying a Cast, because there's quite a lot of characters of different races and ethnicities in the cast already so it's most likely Colorblind Casting. Nevertheless, it hasn't been acknowledged by the creators in any way.
Western Animation
- Jinx in the DC comics is a bald Indian woman. Jinx from the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon (and works that reuse that design, such as Teen Titans Go! and DC Super Hero Girls) is completely different looking. She has pale grey skin and pink Anime Hair. She isn't clearly identifiable as any ethnicity.
- Blade has always been drawn as a dark skinned Black man in the comics. In Spider-Man: The Animated Series he has brown hair, racially ambiguous features and in every appearance his skin is a different shade of brown, in one instance being barely darker than the Caucasian characters. He could be anything from a light skinned Black man to biracial to a white guy with a tan. Confusing things further, comic book Blade is actually mixed-race, he just doesn't look it (his father was a white man named Lucas Cross), although this was retconned in long after his animated appearances.
