Troubled Sympathetic Bigot

Accept them? How can I accept them? Can I deny everything I believe in? On the other hand, can I deny my own daughter? On the other hand, how can I turn my back on my faith, my people? If I try and bend that far, I'll break. On the other hand... No! There is. No. Other. Hand!

—Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof, deciding to disown his beloved daughter for marrying a man from another religion.

This character is genuinely sympathetic, but his opinions are not. This creates a tension that creates drama and angst. Such a character is often a walking debate/Aesop on whether Rousseau Was Right or not—can we rise above our petty prejudices?

He will harm himself with his bigotry. And maybe others, too. However, he's unlikely to go so far as to engage in actual Honor-Related Abuse. Pitying Perversion might be generated, in either direction. He might be ashamed of his lack of bigotry, fearing that it will make him a traitor to his race, gender, religious group or whatever.

While a very different kind of character, Cerebus Syndrome may lead a Noble Bigot or an Innocent Bigot to become a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot. A Troubled Sympathetic Bigot tends to be neither heroic nor villainous—he's only a little human, struggling with his life.

Sometimes a Knight Templar, Heteronormative Crusader or Windmill Crusader can be a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot at heart. A He-Man Woman Hater is rarely this, while it's far more common in a woman who Does Not Like Men—sometimes with a cheesy justification. All of these characters are likely to suffer from Internalized Categorism or be recovering from Black and White Insanity. A Politically-Incorrect Villain who makes a Heel Face Turn may have a transition period as a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot.

For characters who are destructive yet sympathetic - without having any internal conflict about their own bigotry - see instead Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.

Examples of Troubled Sympathetic Bigot include:

Anime

• In the Fullmetal Alchemist movie, many of the AU versions of the characters that we've come to know and love have quite literally become Nazis. Quite sympathetic ones though.

Comic Books

• In Johanna and Helena, Anna is stuck with her well-meaning but very religious parents who she assume will never accept her if they find out she's a lesbian. The parents eventually find out and politely disown her and her girlfriend. There is no malice in their rejection, and no sarcasm in their politeness. Only an overwhelming sadness.
  • They probably honestly believe that their daughter will burn in hell for not being mainstream. And thus they are, in a way, in hell themselves...
• Bitchy Butch is often portrayed this way, unlike her more genuinely unsympathetic counterpart Midge.
• Magneto of the Marvel Universe has been very different characters under different authors. In some versions he was this trope, both as a villain and as a reluctant hero.
• In Logicomix, Ferge is totally honest and devoted to truth & logic. Sadly, this devotion combined with Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance leads to Black and White Insanity in the form of a Straw Vulcan despise for women and jews. On the whole, this make him a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot who is desperately trying to do the right thing.

Film

• In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye is constantly struggling with his belief in tradition versus his three daughters' yearning for liberation. He manages to accept the first two of them (who want to chose their own husbands, but within their own religion), but draws the line with the third (who falls in love with a Christian). With this daughter, Tevye is shown to be on the edge of committing Honor-Related Abuse—but he never carries it out, making him a failed patriarch but keeping him from becoming a failed human being.
• In At Five in The Afternoon, the protagonist's father is a Taliban who wants women to be passive illiterates dressed in burqas. However, he doesn't really have any time oppressing his daughter, because he's busy trying to keep her and the rest of his family alive. He fails. The movie ends with his grandson and only male heir dying in his arms from starvation. He's heartbroken over the few small liberties she takes in his face, and because she loves him and doesn't want to break his heart further she keeps it secret from him that she's actually learning to read.
• In Schindler's List, the protagonist wrestles with his conscience for quite a while before making the leap from being a nazi slaver to being a subversive hero secretly saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
• In Gran Torino, Walt is annoyed to find a Hmong family has moved in next door to him, calling them "gooks" and "zipperheads" (likely a combination of his own status as a Korea vet, old-fashioned values, and a heavy dose of Grumpy Old Man), he is further annoyed, after chasing away some gang-bangers who were harassing a boy in the Hmong family, when his new neighbors send him gifts of thanks and invite him over. In the end, he is forced to confront his own notions of his neighbors being lazy, no-good dog-eaters, and genuinely makes friends among them (except for the matriarch, who is apparently bigoted against white people). He ends up willing his classic Gran Torino to the boy after his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Easy A: Marianne seem to suffer worse from her own actions then it hurts Olive, and it's not from some kind of retributive Karma either. She seem to mean well, but be horribly misguided.
• Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He hates Indians, but will only kill those he sees as Asshole Victims. He comes to grudgingly respect his adopted nephew, who is one-eighth Cherokee. And he doesn't know whether he wants to kill his own niece because of his anger at her having "become an Indian" or because he fervently believes that "living with [Indians] ain't being alive."

Literature

• In Les Misérables Inspector Javert starts out as a regular lawman, but is gradually shown to suffer from Black and White Insanity. In the end, he's quite sympathetic as he struggles with his worldview.
• In a weird example, Vimes from Discworld is treated like one, but it's a mostly informed characteristic - he never actually says anything especially racist. Of course, since he thinks equally badly of all Discworld species, he probably doesn't exactly qualify as "bigoted" anyways, and is more of a Troubled Sympathetic Misanthrope. He loves the city and will fight like hell to keep it in order, but he doesn't think well of the actual people. Thud showcases Vimes's internal conflicts best, but most of the City Watch books are driven by Vimes's fight to protect and serve a bunch of assholes he doesn't care about.
  • It's clearer in Men At Arms, when the Watch gets a troll, a dwarf, and a werewolf as new recruits. From there on, it gets a passing mention as he reflects that more non-humans are entering the Watch and comes in really strong in Thud when he's forced to take on a vampire.
  • With regards to vampires Vimes is certainly a bigot, and refuses to permit any into the watch until forced by Vetinari. He is shown in Men at Arms to hate vampires because of their stereotypical links to aristocracy. The latest book Snuff deals very heavily with the ideas of prejudice (particularly towards Goblins who are not considered citizens and ergo, have no rights even when they're the victims or murder) and shows Vimes to have grown quite philosophical about his earlier prejudices. His comments about another character finding redemption through his treating all thinking beings as equals say a lot about his Character Development.
• In The Winds of War and War and Remembrance it is quite regular for heroes to be this toward Germans and Japanese. Not Nazis and Japanese militarists, Germans and Japanese, and it is taken for granted.
• Queen Elizabeth Winton in Honor Harrington toward the planet of Haven. In her case not only did they apparently assassinate kin of hers, they had mounted a war of aggression against her kingdom and until recently had had a grotesquely tyrannical regime. Under the circumstance it is understandable but it delayed peace between them(it did not help that a more shadowy player in the game was committing more attempted assassinations to keep them fighting).
• Rene Vorbretten in Vorkosigan Saga not only hates Cetegandans, which is an understandable if rather an ungentlemanly trait for such an otherwise amiable character, as not only are they the national enemy but they killed his father in battle. In fact he hates them so much that he is disgusted to find that he bears Cetagandan ancestry. In other words he is like a Russian who not only hates Germans for invading Russia but is shocked to learn that some of his ancestors are German like the ancestors of some real Russians(and that would make for a theme in a non sci-fi drama by the way). In fairness to him not only does his country make a big deal about geneology but this discovery threatens his legal claim to a noble title, or in other words is effectively a threat to his home.

Live Action TV

• Archie Bunker from All in The Family has shades of this (as well as most tropes related to bigotry), as one of the main themes of the series is how lost he feels in a modern world that constantly challenges his prejudices. This is most notable in "Stretch Cunningham Goodbye", one of the series' best episodes, where Archie is invited to give the eulogy at a close friend's funeral, not knowing that the man was Jewish.
• Pierce Hawthorne on Community can come across as this. Pierce's inappropriateness, overzealous creativity, and pathological need to be accepted at all cost are all rooted in frustrations getting attention from his father and his fear that his age is now isolating himself from the rest of the study group.
• King Uther from Merlin. He hates all magic because of his wife's death, and genuinely believes that he's doing what's right when he commits genocide against those that practice magic. He's also a Hypocrite considering he seeks out magical help when he's really desperate (thus indicating that he knows magic can be used for good), and ultimately his actions cause his illegitimate daughter to turn against him, something that drives him to his death.

Theater

• Nellie Forbush and Lieutenant Cable from South Pacific. Nellie is in love with Emile but tearfully leaves him when she finds out he was once married to a "colored" woman, and has two half-Polynesian children. Cable is in love with Liat, but refuses to marry a Tonkinese woman. Cable's song "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" is a self-loathing explanation of how he and Nellie acquired such deep-seated prejudice. Nellie eventually overcomes her prejudice and learns to love Emile's children, but Cable is killed before he has a chance to reconcile with Liat.

Visual Novels

• Sakuya Shirogane Le Bel, of Hatoful Boyfriend, is a huge racist and classist Upper Class Twit with the Freudian Excuse that this is exactly how his father raised him to be, and he can't imagine going against his father's will. This causes him quite a bit of trouble when the (human) heroine pursues romance with him and then helps him acknowledge his passion for music. The free version of his route ends with him going to confront his father about his desire to be a working-class pigeon; in the paid version his father disowns him for this. The dark arc, Bad Boys' Love, goes even further: disowned half-brother Yuuya reveals that Sakuya is actually his full brother, not actually the son of the father who raised him a bigot, and also a half-breed of less than noble blood. And then Yuuya dies in front of him.

Western Animation

• In ThunderCats (2011) Claudus is a stern father to Lion-O, a very narrow-minded king whom genuinely believes the cats are the Superior Species. He believes his peoples Fantastic Racism is justified. Dispite all his flaws, deep down he's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who only wants what's best for his people and his son.