Pretend Prejudice

"A beth din is a council of elders that presides over matters of Jewish law. (to Snot, who is Jewish) Yours is a rich and fascinating culture which we despise."

—Skinhead, American Dad

You've got a character who is very proud of being X, and thinks that all Y's (and Z's, and A through W's for that matter) are an inferior race/species/gender/religion/AcceptableTarget and should be killed in a massive uprising by X's and those surviving enslaved.r

There's just one problem. 90% of his friends are Y's. He talks a good game, probably mumbles "Kill all Y's" in his sleep, but deep down he likes them (or at least doesn't hate them genocidally). Tends to show up in general as a Pet the Dog moment when there's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Heroic Comedic Sociopath or Sociopathic Hero or Token Evil Teammate in the main character lineup.

Of course, once he meets up with people who do genuinely deeply share his skin deep belief, these Y friends will make things very complicated. Usually because his new X-ist friends insist he kills them to prove how devoted he is to the cause. Of course, he'll be forced to decide which he prefers (and side with the Y friends). Occasionally, this won't shake their Y-cism, and may in fact trigger loud protests that he still hates them.

Examples of Pretend Prejudice include:

Anime and Manga

• Code Geass: Gino Weinberg is a nice, cheerful guy who really likes the idea of Britannia being a brutal, racist dystopia. He's still very good friends (maybe too good) with Suzaku, who is Japanese, the persecuted minority group in the series.

Comic Books

• Baron Helmut Zemo from Marvel Comics was the son of a Nazi and very much a racist and supremecist. That didn't stop him from having people of other ethnicities and races on his super-villain teams, though. One could argue that he was just using them, but either way he was still quiet about it all, compared to how he spoke about Captain America (comics)'s black partner, Falcon, or his Jewish (and gay) friend, Arnie. To cement the irony, he even had a French guy on his team at least once. And his father, a full-blown Nazi, once had a Chinese villain, Radioactive Man, on his team of super-villains (later, Helmut would have the same, now-reformed man on one of his heroic teams as well). Eventually, during his very rocky proto-redemption(He was really just an Anti-Villain and not a real good guy), he slept with a Jewish teammate who was "secretly" trying to stop his Evil Plan.
• Sparkplug, a Superhero character from the Flare/Champions universe, was raised by Nazi war criminals, and if asked will proudly declare her racial superiority, but she'll save anyone of any race, work with heroes of any race, she does nothing to promote her beliefs and actively avoids contact with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists; in fact she feels sorry for those "not fortunate enough" to be born Aryan.
• The Boondocks. Uncle Ruckus. Although he can basically be described as a black klansman, Ruckus sure does spend a hell of a lot of time with Robert Freeman.
• Justice League Elite communications and intelligence expert Naif al-Sheikh complains repeatedly that he hates Superheroes, Women, and anyone else that tests his rather limited patience. The fact that his best friend Vera Black is a white, female, punk rocker ex-supervillain mean such complaints end up falling rather flat however, especially since he eventually ended up getting himself arrested because he couldn't bring himself to harm her.

Film -- Live Action

• Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with toons, because one killed his old partner. It doesn't stop him from becoming good friends with Roger though (much to his chagrin).
  • Even before he comes into contact with Roger, Eddie is shown to be on good terms with Betty Boop, and openly lusts after Jessica Rabbit (along with the rest of the male population).
    • Before the death of said partner (who was also his brother), the two actually specialized in Toon cases because they thought Toons were such a gas. Eddie becoming friends with Roger is sort of him relearning why Valiant And Valiant used to do the sort of work they did.
• In Gangs of New York, the Nativist gang leader professes to despise immigrants, yet he deeply respects his old Irish nemesis and even takes the man's son under his wing.
  • Of course, he doesn't realize that that he is the rival leader's son for most of the movie. It's more that Bill "hates the Irish" yet takes in someone with a pretty obvious Irish accent.
• Lampshaded in Do the Right Thing when Mookie points out that most of the music Pino likes are by black musicians.
• Gran Torino: Walt Kowalski has more in common with his Hmong neighbors than his own family, despite spouting every slur in the book. Then again, he has a slur for everybody, including his fellow white man, and takes (not to mention uses) a few for his own Polish background.
• Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket refers to blacks as jungle bunnies, cracks a joke to his buddy 8-Ball (a black man) about sickle cell, and when the prostitute comes around to the squad, takes her from 8-Ball, saying "All fucking niggers should fucking hang." Of course, he's a Heroic Sociopath, but considering the fact they're all fighting in Vietnam, it seems the point is that race is tertiary to these guys. They're Marines first, Americans second, then whatever race they are. Gunnery Sgt. Hartman falls under this as well.
  • When 8-Ball is down and being used as bait by the sniper, it's Animal Mother that goes ballistic with his need to save him.
• |Dead Air: Logan is forced to badmouth Muslims on the air by one of the terrorists, who are seeking to ignite a war between the western and Arab cultures through the attacks. His initial attempts at resistance and the revelation that his wife is, in fact, Muslim offer proof that he doesn't really mean what he's being forced to say.

Literature

• Christopher from Everworld, who claims to be a homophobic, anti-semitic, racist redneck. Ends up befriending a gay god, a Jew, and an African American during the course of the story, but even before then he didn't really mean most of his comments and even after he bonds with his friends he still makes jokes of the "I swear I'm still a racist" variety.
• In the Dragaera stories, Vlad Taltos hates Dragaerans and becomes an assassin so that he can get paid to brutalize them. However as time goes on, he realizes that almost all of his genuine friends are Dragaerans, and he feels alienated from most of his own kind. This only gets worse over time, as he starts to learn that humans can also be bastards.
  • Arguably, the same could be said of Vlad's Dragaeran friends, particularly Aliera and Morrolan. Both are highly self-aggrandizing and likely believe in their superiority to humans (Aliera certainly does, Morrolan might not being raised as one). Neither see any problem with conducting brutal wars of conquest against human-populated areas. Still, they see Vlad as a valued friend.
  • After Vlad discovers that he is the reincarnation of the Dragaeran noble who founded the House of Jhereg after being exiled from his birth House (and was, incidentally, the brother of Aliera's previous incarnation) he starts questioning his prejudice, and wonders how much stems from the bitter resentment from that Dragaeran past life...
• Speaker-To-Animals from Ringworld could stand out as a Proud Warrior Race Guy variation.
  • Remember, that's the name the Kzinti gave a diplomat.
• Sam Vimes in Discworld supposedly has a high degree of Fantastic Racism, but this almost seems like an Informed Flaw in order to invoke the Noble Bigot with a Badge idea. In any case, the Watch he commands contains men, women, dwarfs, trolls, a werewolf, a zombie, a golem, a vampire, gnomes, an Igor, gargoyles, at least one local equivalent of a Jehovah's Witness, a government auditor, and Nobby Nobbs.
  • Vimes is an equal-opportunity bigot. He thinks that everyone sucks.
    • But he clearly thinks that vampires suck worse than anyone else, and goes out of his way to avoid hiring vampires until directly order to by the Patrician.
    • Or, to quote: "There are coppers, and there is everyone else." His categorization of "everyone else" mostly consists of "morons" and "suspects".
  • Colon, also fitting the Noble Bigot with a Badge idea might be a better example, especially in Jingo. He dislikes anything "foreign" and expresses a desire that all non-white citizens of Ankh-Morpork should leave, particularly the Klatchian ones with whom the city-state is currently at war. Still, he continues to eat at his favorite Klatchian restaurant where they know to make his curry sufficiently bland so it doesn't seem "foreign".
    • Even he starts to soften at the end though, after they actually visit Klatch and when Nobby points out his hypocrisy. And even when he expressed an attitude about the 'right' colour he ended up confusing himself, as Constable Visit (an Omnian) is described by Nobby as 'pretty brown' and he had no problem with him, eventually concluding white is a state of mind. All in all his prejudice seemed to be more in the vein of national fervor than anything else, latching onto the most obvious common distinction between them. It is said once, and shown frequently, in the books that Fred is as a rule amicably disposed towards most people.
    • By the end of the book Fred has softened enough in his attitudes to no longer be willing to patronize a restaurant that shows open racism. (And for Fred Colon to be unwilling to eat, you know that's a pretty major change of heart.)
• In Angels & Demons Kohler hates Christianity, his best friend is a priest (and scientist).
• Jeronimo in the The Baroque Cycle is to begin with a Spanish nobleman and proud of it, and thus given the setting, would likely be one with a low opinion of those of other races and religions. He also has Tourette's Shitcock Syndrome which within the book is treated like a Demonic Possession which makes him reveal his true thoughts. Thus, you get Jeronimo becoming close to his fellow escaped galley slaves and when he declares his loyalty to his companions, he states (paraphrased) "You niggers, kikes, and camel jockeys are the only friends I've ever had!"
• In the Animorphs special book Visser, Visser One displays this towards humans during her trial. Given the flashback format, it's pretty transparent (even to the tribunal, which is able to see her memories).

Live Action TV

• A lampshade is hung on this in Generation Kill over the course of an awesomely Derailed Conversation. One of the Marines starts unloading on the other guys about how they view Pocahontas after everything that happened to the Indians. Eventually, one of the other guys points out that even though he says he's an Indian, he looks like a Mexican, talks like he's Black, and he only ever hangs out with the White Marines. So just what the hell is he really?
• Fred Tupper from Little Mosque on the Prairie regularly rants about Muslims (often accusing them of being terrorists) on his radio show but has no problem with: going to a Muslim doctor, watching a football game with a room full of Muslims, and eating halal food from a Muslim-owned cafe. In fact, he seems to have something of a friendship with Fatima, the cafe-owner. He's certainly shown that he cares about her.

Video Games

• Crypto, in the video game Destroy All Humans! 1, says very mean things about humans. By Destroy All Humans! 2, after using pure Furon DNA to create a clone with working genitalia, conoodling with many hot 70s girls, and being president of the United States, though he still says hateful things about humans, by that point he's just going through the motions, and trying to keep his feelings hidden.

Web Comics

• Belkar, the Heroic Sociopath from Order of the Stick, ostensibly has a deep-seated speciesism towards humans (and kobolds, and... well, anything besides himself, really), but he has at times shown a grudging respect for Roy, and was more than willing to join the rescue effort when Elan was captured by bandits. He has also expressed occasional sympathy for Haley and admiration for Lord Shojo. Furthermore, he has no qualm at all against banging human women.
  • Belkar is kind of an inversion of the trope - pretty much every example on that list of ways his prejudice is "pretend" can be explained by the fact that it appeals to his nasty or duplicitous side (Roy in particular has mentioned that when Belkar agrees with him, he knows he's doing something wrong, and Shojo earned his admiration by being a major Magnificent Bastard quite apart from any discussion of Character Alignment), but ever since he had a hallucination that told him he could achieve much more long-term mayhem by faking Character Development for the short term, he's been pretending to be a much more complex and nuanced character; Pretend Tolerance, kind of thing.
• From Homestuck, Eridan talks a lot of talk about how much he hates land-dwellers and trolls with inferior blood colours to the point of commissioning Vriska to make him a doomsday device to kill all non-sea-dwelling trolls. However, of his eleven friends all but one have inferior blood colours to him, and apart from a few racist phrases every now and then he doesn't seem particularly bothered. Eventually everyone just stopped listening, assuming he was simply out for attention, and if he wasn't before he probably is now.
• Mike from Shortpacked spends just as much time trolling his targets to "prove" that he or she is racist, as he does finding out what your identity is to apply some bigotism to it.

Web Original

• During one of her reviews of a Bug/Flying Pokémon, IGN's Pokémon of the Day Chick said that she wanted to burn every single Bug/Flying type alive... except Scyther, who "would be spared because he kicks ass". The fact that, as of April 2010, Scyther's evolved form Scizor is one of the highest-ranking Pokémon in Smogon's OU tier may very well not hurt her case, even though she said this in 2002 or 2003.
• Mitt Romney, in this video from The Onion.
• 4Chan in general, while it does use enough N-words to make everyone in The Boondocks blush. Most (If not all of them) don't genuinely have issues with black people.
  • They have also gone after white supremacists like Hal Turner.

Western Animation

• Bender from Futurama. He's still a massive jerk to everybody, though. Had his moment when he visited a robot planet, and had to lead a search for Fry and Leela, the only humans there. He kept hiding them, or stalling. Though Fry and Leela showed some of their prejudices against robots in general in that episode.
  • Fry in particular shows himself to be another example of the trope; he feels sorry for his best friend Bender having to make a delivery on an "uninhabited" planet.

Bender: It is inhabited, by robots.
Fry: You mean in the way a warehouse is inhabited by boxes?

• • And he does mumble "Kill all humans" in his sleep.
• South Park. Cartman. Despite he and Kyle hating each other due to Cartman's religious bigotry, they spend a hell of a lot of time together.
  • They do try to ditch Cartman and they are happy when he's not around.
  • Actually, in the movie, this is subverted when Kyle tells Cartman he's Jewish, and Cartman doesn't believe him, saying "No, you're not, don't be so hard on yourself." To Cartman, "jew" is just an insult.

Cartman: Kyle, all those times I told you you're a dumb Jew, I didn't mean it. You're not a Jew.

• • • In another episode, when he wanted a favor out of Kyle, he denied ever having mocked Kyle for being Jewish. We were promptly treated to a thirty-second montage of all the times in the show Cartman had insulted him by calling him a fucking Jew.
  • Also, earlier:

Mr. Garrison: Eric! Did you just say the F-Word?
Cartman: Jew?

• Family Guy: Peter once tried to pretend he was racist so he could get out of jury duty. Hilarity Ensues.

Peter Griffin: Awful lotta Honkies in here.

Real Life

• Former eBay CEO and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman was strongly anti-illegal immigration. However, it was found that she had knowingly hired an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.
  • Former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has done something similar.
• Strom Thurmond was a racist American politician who once said "I want to tell you that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." He also had a secret half-black daughter that he supported financially. This was not revealed until after his death.
• Any of the many homophobes who turn out to be gay themselves.
• This Troper once heard (orally) a story of a man (who had never acted so before) making antisemitic statements as a way of sucking up to Nazis during World War 2. It turned out after the war that he was a Deep-Cover Agent of La Resistance keeping up his cover. In spite of the risk of hurting the feelings of friends he had had before the war.