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Death by Racism

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Death by Racism (trope)
Keen karma for The Klan.
Old Lady: Oh Gob, you could charm the black off a telegram boy!
Narrator: Okay we'll just tell you now. She's the one who dies.
Arrested Development, "S.O.B.s"

Bob's dead! How sa- wait, he was an unrepentant bigot? Never mind...

Everyone loves a good Hate Sink. Imagine, for example, an American film happens to feature Alice, an ethnically Chinese or Mexican character. She might speak perfectly good English, but she might also occasionally speak in her native language. While the other characters think nothing of it, Bob consistently harasses her, insisting she should only "speak 'Merican, dammit!" Rest assured: before the story is over, Bob will die the most humiliating death in the entire movie.

Death by Racism is a convenient way to treat the audience to a visually satisfying death scene no one will feel guilty for enjoying. Sometimes Bob suffers as a form of revenge, but more often than not, he was just chosen at random by the show's real Big Bad, which makes this more of a Karmic Death. Bob's killer might even be a bigot themselves; it's just that bigotry was irrelevant in this particular killing. If the killer is also portrayed as an incompetent failure of a human being, see Sub-Par Supremacist.

This trope is most common in shows that have a single Token Minority, but it can also turn up in shows with a Five-Token Band. When taken to extremes, it can become Narm or be an obvious Author Tract. Often overlaps with Bigotry Before Reason, Bullying a Dragon, or Mugging the Monster. Compare Politically Incorrect Villain and Asshole Victim. Contrast Vasquez Always Dies and Black Dude Dies First. When a character's racism directly causes their death, that's a form of Laser-Guided Karma.

Note that if done badly, this could be a case of Strawman Has a Point and Felony Misdemeanor. If the target of the insult was himself an Asshole Victim, the outburst the writers considered irredeemably racist comes off to certain viewers as excusable (or simply not heinous enough to deserve death), and Bob's fate may not seem like the Karmic Death it was intended to be.

As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 
  • In Black Lagoon, during the Neo-Nazi Arc, many Nazis are killed by the protagonists, Chinese-American Revy and African-American Dutch (also, the crew had a hacker Jew and a former Japanese salaryman on board at the time). When the commander is cornered, given a gun by Revy, and given a choice to either die by suicide or for them to shoot him, he decides to try to shoot Dutch, only to find out there were no bullets. Revy pulls out her other gun and the two both shoot him.
  • One Piece: A double example when it comes to the death of the former Captain of the Sun Pirates, Fisher Tiger. The official story everyone hears is that he died because the humans refused give a blood transfusion that could have saved him as a result of their racism towards Fishman and Merfolk. The actual reason as revealed by Jinbe is that Tiger himself refused a blood transfusion because of his hatred of humans after what they did to him when he became a slave of the Celestial Dragons.
  • The Darwin Incident: The diner owner Rivera runs into is shown to be racist, with him insulting Rivera for being black and Rivera calling him out on it. Soon after, he's stabbed to death by Gare.

    Comic Books 
  • Blood Syndicate: The spinoff miniseries Wise Son: The White Wolf begins with a skinhead getting punished for his racism when some black people he pissed off beat him to death.
  • Creepy Magazine: In a story called Hell Hound Blues, a couple of racist record collectors go after an old, valuable blues record that a wise old black man tells them he has in a secret location. Throughout the story, they belittle and insult this old man. They, uh, don't make it to the record.
  • Mampato: In the Congo, when the protagonists travel to the Belgian Congo, they meet Jones, the owner of a tobacco plantation who is incredibly abusive towards his African servants and uses racial slurs against them. Mampato and Ogu knock him down and humiliate him, all this is seen by the natives, and Jones decides to take revenge and gives weapons to his servants to ambush Mampato and his friend... But his servants kill him in revenge for all the abuse they suffered.
  • Nightwing: The hero invokes this as an effective interrogation technique on a member of an Aryan skinhead gang. Nightwing dangles him upside down over a multi-ethnic neighborhood whose inhabitants include African-Americans, Hispanics, Indians, and Middle-Easterners. Nightwing politely says if the man doesn't want to talk, Nightwing will lower him to the street - gently, without injuring him - and let him find his own way home. The man is so terrified that he weeps, and Nightwing taunts him for not having the courage of his "convictions."
  • Runaways: In the "Dead-End Kids" arc, the team ends up in 1907 New York, where Nico runs afoul of the local "heroes", one of whom calls her a "chink" and threatens to beat her. He's later seen getting his spine ripped out by one of the local villains, the only casualty from that team in the climactic battle. However, Lilli refers to Nico as "the Oriental who looks at me like I'm a bug" but survives the battle and lives on in the present day.
  • Sin City: There are two instances in which a man uses a racial slur against Miho. To call them Too Dumb to Live would be an understatement.
  • Spawn: Spawn has a doubly-literal example: A Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit judge is turned into a black man by Spawn's magic powers. Then, his former Klansmen friends lynch him to death. So, he was killed by racism, and by racists.

    Fan Works 
  • Code Prime:
    • At the beginning of R2, Gilbert tries to work with Milly's Mother, Kallen's Stepmother, and the Black King to start an uprising in an Energon mine. However, unlike Gilbert, the other three are unwilling to work with the Japanese slaves in the mine, which leads to their deaths at the hands of Thunderhoof.
    • Really, this could just be applied as a societal version to Britannia as a whole. While they have been acting racist towards other humans, their racism extends to alien creatures as well, calling the Autobots as mere "vile machines" and dismissing the Decepticons as mere aliens (even they too get called the "vile machine" moniker by Beatrice)...just as they are about to sack the Britannian capital and later on destroy the entire empire.
  • In Cool Cat and the Beauty of War and Destruction, this is how Moon Man dies.
    Moon Man was shocked, this wasn't how the plan was supposed to go! Luckily, he always has a Plan B. He had read Berserk and it was time to take a page out of Griffith's book. Moon Man gathered the corpses of his friends and sacrificed them in exchange for more power. However, since he is a moon, the members of the Idea of Evil didn't like the idea of a moon-person amongst them since they are racist. They decided that they didn't want him in their group so they rejected him and Moon Man perished. That's right, a racist like Moon Man was defeated by racism itself.

    Film — Animated 
  • Done with a heavy dose of Irony in the Ralph Bakshi film Coonskin. A racist cop moonlighting as a low-level mafia bag boy is drugged, dressed in Black Face and the stereotypical Mammy character, forced into sex with a gay man, and then is shot up by his fellow cops while he's spun out on the drugs.
  • Implied in Killer Bean Forever. A racist policeman makes fun of Jet Bean's Chinese nationality and mocks his intelligence, putting what he was trying to say into "something [he] can understand"; that being broken English and random mentions of Chow Mein. Jet responds by kicking the cop so hard that he goes flying into a wall. This cop is not seen getting back up, yet the other cop only lists "Assault of an officer" after Jet is arrested, possibly meaning he was just knocked out.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • In Army of the Dead, an unscrupulous guard at the makeshift camp outside zombie-torn Las Vegas acts as a Hate Sink when he assaults helpless refugees living in the camps. Only a few minutes later in movie time, he's used as live bait so that the Zombie King will let the protagonists move through his territory.
  • In Be Cool, the Russian mobster who runs the pawnshop ends up being shot by the black music producer Sid LaSalle for calling him the N-word.
  • At the climax of BlacKkKlansman, the three most vile KKK members are killed when they accidentally detonate the parcel bomb they planned to use to murder a civil rights protester.
  • In A Bronx Tale, C's friends, and especially Slick, die because of their hatred of black people. They get blown up by their own Molotov cocktails after a black guy throws one back at them.
  • Circle: Since the characters are forced to kill each other off by popular vote, every time one of the abductees espouses openly bigoted views, they're almost inevitably chosen.
  • In Come and See, a unit of Red Army partisans ambushes and takes revenge on an SS Einsatzgruppe which has been destroying Russian villages and slaughtering their inhabitants in various grisly ways. The German officer goes to his death, coldly justifying his actions on the grounds that Slavs are sub-human and a lesser species - to the faces of his Slavic - Russian - captors.
  • By its very nature, Crash (2004) (the Haggis one, not the Cronenberg one) averts and subverts this with various characters.
  • Narrowly averted in Die Hard with a Vengeance. John McClane is dropped off in Harlem (a predominantly black neighbourhood) wearing only his boxers and a sandwich board around his neck with "I hate [N-word]s" written on it. After running afoul of what appears to be a gang, McClane is only saved from death by the intervention of a shopkeeper. Of course, when this scene was filmed, the sign was blank, with the text being added in post-production. In the TV edit, it's "I hate everyone"
  • Koobus from District 9 could be considered an example. Late in the film, he admits that he loves watching prawns die, 'prawns' being the aliens. At the climax, a group of prawns tear him apart and eat him.
  • Mary-Lou Barebone of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the leader of an anti-wizard organization and beats her adoptive children (who are implied to be the now-orphaned children of witches and wizards she has killed or had killed) when they display signs of magic. In the end, she is killed by the Obscurus summoned by one of her adopted sons, Credence, after she beat one of her daughters for having a toy wand.
  • The bulk of the interaction between the Jerk Jocks and the Indian kid Ravi in The Final consists of them taunting him with racist remarks about "dotheads" and "thank you come again!". They don't actually die, but judging by what happens to them, death may have been a welcome escape.
  • Across Final Destination, Death itself seems to have a consistent intolerance for racism. And why wouldn't it? After all, everyone is equal in death's eyes. For specifics:
    • The first victim of Death in Final Destination 4 is Carter, a churlish redneck who has no compunctions whatsoever about calling African Americans the N-Word. (His character is actually listed as "Racist" in the end-credits.) He is given a humiliating end when he tries to burn a cross KKK-style in front of George, the black lead's, house: his tow truck snags him by the ankle and drags him burning and screaming in a manner similar to an infamous modern lynching while playing War's "Why Can't We Be Friends" before it explodes.
    • Isaac in Final Destination 5, who, in comparison to the above, is merely unbelievably insensitive and stereotypes the Asian workers at the massage parlor. This is only one of his many character flaws. He gets some karmic retribution from the staff before Death comes in and drops a heavy Buddha statue (about which he'd made one of his insensitive wisecracks) on his head.
  • Not really deaths in most cases, but the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury (or alternatively, The Chinese Connection) is about a bunch of stupid, stupid people being racially discriminating and abusive against the Chinese and Bruce Lee's character (and by extension, Bruce Lee himself), then promptly getting the snot beaten out of them. In a more literal case, Chen himself: yes, Chen was guilty of a number of crimes, but there was absolutely no justice in his "arrest" in the film's ending sequence. It is highly likely that no one in the Japanese karate school faced punishment for massacring the students at Chen's kung-fu school, seeing as how the Japanese authorities viewed the Chinese as lesser people.
  • Hannibal Rising: The ex-collaborator French racist who insulted young Hannibal Lecter's Samurai-blooded aunt is sliced into chunks by him with her family's Katana as the boy's first victim. Given Lecter's dislike for rude people, this also overlaps with Laser-Guided Karma. Lecter's aunt still disapproves, fearing what he might turn into.
  • Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: A secret agent jumps out of an aeroplane without a parachute, chasing after the title characters, after 90 minutes of brutalizing and terrorizing ethnic minorities.
  • Big Bob from The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in keeping with his status as the Carter family's resident Jerkass, is a massive racist and xenophobe. He winds up being the first of the family to die, and gets the most gruesome death in the film: being crucified and burned alive.
  • The unfortunate Boss Tanaka from Kill Bill, who makes the rather grievous error of insulting O-Ren Ishii's Japanese/Chinese-American heritage, and promptly pays dearly for his insult.
  • Happens in several of George A. Romero's "Living Dead Series" films:
    • In Dawn of the Dead (1978) a particularly unhinged S.W.A.T. officer indulges his homicidal fantasies, gunning down ghoul and living alike in an apartment complex after shouting various racist epithets about blacks, Hispanics, and Puerto Ricans. He actually gets put down by one of his fellow S.W.A.T. members.
    • In Day of the Dead (1985), Captain Rhodes makes several racist remarks to the helicopter pilot, John. At the climax of the film, he ends up Devoured by the Horde torn apart by the living dead.
    • In Land of the Dead, Kaufman refers to John Leguizamo's character as a "spic" (ironically, this character goes by the name "Cholo" which is itself a slur). He later encounters that character, who has become a zombie, just before zombie leader Big Daddy rolls a flaming barrel his way, blowing both of them up.
  • Lone Star (1996): After murdering innocent African-Americans and Tejanos by shooting them in the back with the false accusation of self-defense and getting away with it for years, the racist sheriff Charlie Wade ends up shot in the back by his own partner deputy Hollis Pogue using the exact same dirty trick he pulled on his victims.
  • In No Time to Die, MI-6 agent Nomi captures Mad Scientist Valdo Obruchev, the inventor of the DNA-targeting nanomachines-based weapon Heracles, in the climax, and intends to bring him alive to the UK. Both find themselves above an Acid Pool (the "farm" to produce Heracles), and Obruchev stupidly suggests that he could reprogram Heracles to wipe out her entire race from the face of the earth. Nomi, who is black and of African descent herself, chooses to simply kick Obruchev into the acid pool after hearing that.
  • Big Dan Teague in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: When our heroes crash a Klan meeting he's attending, after he does his best to kill them, they drop a giant flaming cross right on his face. Homer Stokes gets his comeuppance after he reveals his membership to The Klan during an angry tirade, which contributes to the audience quite literally running him out of town on a rail.
  • Cesar in [REC]. The moment he starts making racist comments about the Asian family, you know he isn't going to last long.
  • In Saw 3D, Hoffman abducts four racist skinheads and puts them in a car-based Death Trap that ends up killing them all. Although the lead skinhead, Evan, had a clear task to prevent the trap from working, its stakes were so high that it appears Hoffman had no intention of letting them survive. To drive the point further, Hoffman later uses the corpse of another of the skinheads, Dan, as a decoy to get into a police precinct, strongly implying that he set up the trap and made it barely survivable as part of his grand scheme in the film.
  • Sinners (2025): Taking place in the Deep South, the Klan is an ever-present threat that serves as secondary antagonists of the film.
    • Remmick notices a Klan hood while speaking to Bert and Joan, and exploits their obvious bigotry to get them to help him escape his pursuers. When the Choctaw hunters arrive and attempt to warn Joan that she's in danger, she isn't even remotely willing to listen to an Indian's word. This dooms her and her husband, who become Remmick's first thralls.
    • The Klan show up for their morning ambush, anticipating hung-over and exhausted partygoers that they can massacre for no other reason than pure racism. Instead, Smoke ambushes them with superior firepower and training, massacring the entire group as they attempt to flee for their lives. If only their boss had listened when the twins warned him what would happen if the Klan showed up and not tried to pick a fight with a pair of gangsters.
  • The Untouchables (1987) has a rare heroic example with Malone. When the mob sends a knife man into his apartment, Malone pulls a sawed-off shotgun on him. Malone calls the knife man repeatedly a "Dago" while chasing him out of his apartment. Frank Nitti guns down Malone at the doorway immediately after that.

    Literature 
  • Acid Row features an indirect example with Arthur Miller, who is described as a "dyed-in-the wool racist" and views all black people with distrust. When he sees Jimmy going back into 23 Humbert Street, he assumes he's trying to loot the property and follows him (he's actually trying to get out to the front of the house to help his pregnant girlfriend). Consequently, Arthur is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is mistaken as one of the paedophiles by the mob, leading Wesley to brutally murder him. In a tragic irony, Jimmy does his best to defend the old man from Wesley and is genuinely distraught by his murder.
  • After the Revolution: Upon learning that his companion Manny has been 'reassigned to the Storming Batallions' by the fundamentalist sect they're infiltrating, Super-Soldier Roland has to weigh the value of ruining his cover to rescue Manny, versus focusing on rescuing the people he's actually there to extract from the sect. He almost comes down on the side of staying undercover when Martyr Ditmar ends up making an overtly racist statement about Manny and making it clear he'd been reassigned simply due to his race. Roland gets so annoyed he decides to throw caution to the wind and breaks literally half the bones of every person in the building - starting with Ditmar's wrist. Made doubly satisfying since, unbeknownst to the Martyrs surrounding him, Roland is himself a black man who, thanks to his augmentations, was presenting himself in the guise a dead white person to make his infiltration.
  • The story ''The Capture'' in Animorphs has a belated alien example where the Yeerk parasite who has taken over Jake's body seems to successfully gotten away with his deception. Then he turns around and sees Ax, the Andalite member of the group. Yeerks have been at war with Andalites for decades; for a second hatred and disgust show on Jake's face, just long enough that Ax realizes what's happened and informs the others. The other Animorphs aren't entirely sold but are Properly Paranoid enough to take this seriously. Then Ax touches Jake's face and 'Jake' shouts "GET YOUR HAND OFF ME, ANDALITE FILTH!", which immediately convinces everyone. They lock Jake up and leave the Yeerk to starve out of him over the course of three days.
  • Blood Meridian. Do not tell Black Jackson where he can and can't sit if you enjoy keeping an intact head on your shoulders, as White Jackson and Owens the restaurateur both learned the hard way. It's not because of any sense of frontier justice and it doesn't necessarily make Black Jackson any more sympathetic; he's a vicious and unrepentant killer among a band of them, who's murdered many more Mexicans and Indians who had done nothing to cross him.
  • Chance And Choices Adventures has this happen right near the beginning. The bandit Hank Butterfield attempts to attack half-Native American Noah Swift Hawk for sitting in "a white man's saloon" and is shot dead by the townspeople, prompting the rest of his Bandit Clan to seek revenge and kicking off the plot.
  • In W E B Du Bois's short story The Comet, the main character, a black man, has a menial job at a bank, and it's clear that his white boss is prejudiced against him because of his race. As such, he forces the hero to do a degrading task in the basement while the comet arrives, which unbeknownst to him actually saves the protagonist, since the comet emits deadly gas into the Earth's atmosphere that kills everyone above ground, including the boss.
  • Lord of the Flies: At the end of the book, the mercilessly bullied Piggy finally snaps and rages that the boys on the island should be civilized, and he compares the others' feral savagery to that of "painted Indians." In reaction to Piggy's assertion of naturally ordained civility, Roger murders him.
  • The Naked and the Dead: While many of the officers and enlisted men alike are pretty racist or anti-semitic, Wilson probably uses the most racial slurs of all of them and dies from an Agonizing Stomach Wound.
  • The Nightrunners: After killing a member of the murderous street gang, Bigot with a Badge Larry is so surprised that they're white that their leader Brian is able to sneak up on him and murder him.
  • Stormy Weather: Lester Maddox Parsons, a.k.a. "Snapper", was born to Ku Klux Klan members who named him after Georgia governor Lester Maddox, "best-known for scaring off black restaurant customers with an axe handle."
    • Averted when Lester was a boy and his father got drunk while attending a Klan rally and accidentally set fire to the Grand Kleagle instead of the towering cross. The "frantic Klansman" extinguished the fire and rushed the Kleagle to the hospital, where a (black) doctor managed to save his life. Unfortunately, since his hood was burned off before he arrived, the Kleagle was forced to resign as District Attorney and move to Macon.
    • Played Straight at the end, when Clinton "Skink" Tyree has overpowered Snapper after he shot Skink's friend Jim Tile (non-fatally) and called him the n-word. Skink leaves Snapper to fend for himself deep in the Everglades, sadly saying Snapper has left him no choice. Snapper doesn't make it out of the swamp.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the Tonight, Someone Dies episode of Arrested Development, the narrator points out the woman who does die after she says Gob could "charm the black off a telegram boy."
  • On an episode of Chicago Hope, a young neo-Nazi played by Giovanni Ribisi needs a heart transplant. He ultimately dies because when an Asian-American nurse starts prepping him for surgery, he threatens to have his gang rape her if she touches him.
  • Inverted on The Jeffersons, when a leader of The Klan who'd refused to let his son learn CPR in a class with Louise and Florence suffers a heart attack and is saved by George's use of this skill. His parting words ("You should've let me die") suggest he'd have preferred this to owing his life to a black man.
  • Treated realistically on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where an Arab-hating teen who killed an Arabic victim earlier kills a Middle Eastern fellow prisoner in a holding cell. His lawyer tries a version of the Insanity Defense that's pretty extreme even by Hollywood Law standards; that he's biologically programmed to hate Arabs. He's convicted for the earlier murder, but never serves his time for either murder, as he's ganged up on and killed by the dead prisoner's friends.
  • In the episode "Abominations" of Legends of Tomorrow, Jax has to go undercover as a slave in a Confederate plantation. After it's attacked by zombies, the plantation owner refuses to give Jax a weapon to help fight them off. He is then immediately eaten.
  • Oz: Mark Miles was a Death Row inmate who took to constantly hurling racial insults at his fellow death row member Moses Deyell. This pisses off Moses so much that he digs a hole through the wall in between their cells just so he can strangle Miles to death before his execution.
  • Toned-down example: the pilot for Spenser: For Hire has cool badass Hawk working as the bad guy's bodyguard $ when he's ordered to kill Spenser, he refuses due to mutual respect. Bad guy yells "I told you to kill him, you goddamn nigger!" Hawk raises an eyebrow, clucking "Racial invective!", promptly resigns, and lets Spenser kick the guy's ass.
  • In the episode "Kaddish" of The X-Files, a very rabid Neo-Nazi who incited three teenagers to murder a Jewish store owner is strangled to death by a Golem created in the image of the murdered man, after it's killed the three teenagers. No one sheds any tears over any of them.

    Music 
  • The video for Fatboy Slim's "Don't Let The Man Get You Down" introduces us to a nice-looking fellow named Don, who likes a lot of neat things, like fishing. Then we're shown that he's a racist. The middle of the video is mostly about how he makes his own life miserable by being mean to non-whites. At the end, he dies in a non-sequitur fashion, and an apparent Spoof Aesop is that if you are a racist, you will die in some sort of Karmic Death accident.

    Video Games 
  • In Detroit: Become Human, soon after meeting Zlatko, it's revealed that he's not only racist against androids (like many people in the game) but even goes as far as to kidnap and imprison them to use for horrible experiments. One of the ways the chapter can end is with him being ganged up on and killed by these prisoners.
  • The Great Ace Attorney, the first victim of Resolve dies because she said a few too many anti-Japanese slurs to exactly the wrong person- Raiten Menimemo, a journalist who'd earlier stolen a sample of a rare toxin and hidden it in his pen. He was so fed up with her attitude that he spiked her drink with the poison.
  • In both Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and its comic-book adaptation, Nazi colonel Klaus Kerner meets his end this way. When Indy, Sophia, and the Nazis all find themselves in the Colossus at the very centre of Atlantis, the Nazis decide to see if the Colossus really can transform human beings into gods- and Kerner insists on being the first test subject. In the comic, he boasts that since he is the only person there of "pure-blooded Prussian" ancestry, he is the most fit to be a god; in the game, he brags that his Aryan genes will make him immune to the nightmarish mutations that occurred in most of the previous test subjects. Ignoring the hideously deformed skulls littering the area and (in the comic) even shoving other people out of the way, Kerner triumphantly mounts the platform at the center of the room just as the machine is starting up and proclaims, "I, Klaus Kerner, will rule the world! That Bavarian upstart, Hitler, will kiss my feet!" - right before he melts into a hideous mass of brown gunk. His fate in the game is little better: as the power of the Colossus courses through him, he grows to at least twice his height and laughs triumphantly... then his left eye begins to swell. Without warning, he shrinks and mutates into an antlered dwarf almost identical to the long-dead test subjects he'd earlier dismissed as subhuman. Screaming in horror, he flings himself off the platform and into the lava below.
  • Mass Effect 2: Potentially played straight in Thane's loyalty mission, depending on Shepard's choices. Thane's son has been hired to assassinate a turian politician on the Citadel whose campaign is openly anti-human. While tracking the politician you also see, among other crimes, him extorting money from human shop owners. At the end of the mission, Thane's son takes the politician hostage when the cops arrive. The renegade resolution is for Shepard to simply gun down the politician because he's such a scummy person that Shepard doesn't care about keeping him alive.
  • Forden from Metaphor: ReFantazio would carry out countless anti-elda pogroms all because he couldn't stand being in the presence of one, never mind allowing one to be his ruling sovereign. One of these would result in the deaths of Louis' family, who would one day become a tyrannical warlord and publicly execute Forden in all but name.
  • In Parasite Eve (1998), Japanese scientist Kunihiko Maeda has arrived in New York City to investigate the strange occurrences happening (namely, people spontaneously combusting) that, incidentally, occurred in Japan a few years prior. After being stopped by two policemen who have blockaded the routes into Manhattan, Maeda attempts to explain in his poor English that he needs to enter the city. One of the cops knows Japanese and attempts to communicate with him. The other cop doesn't, and snidely tells Maeda that "if you can't speak the language, go back to your own country!" The racist cop bursts into flames two seconds later.
  • In the [PROTOTYPE] series:
    • [PROTOTYPE]: It turns out the Blacklight Virus was created by Blackwatch in an attempt to wipe out minorities. It backfired into a zombie virus that killed their science team, and later on you as the player character dismantle (brutally murder) the entire organization.
    • [PROTOTYPE 2]: The first post-tutorial level has a Blackwatch officer demanding all the civilians around him line up. When your black player character ignores him, the officer turns around, looks him over, and reiterates: “I said knees on the line… bro.” He dies about one second after. Later on, you kill a group of Gentek scientists who were attempting to sterilize immigrants.
  • Red Dead:
    • In Red Dead Redemption, Herbert Moon is rather prejudiced. The expansion Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare hits him with this trope while cranking his racism up to a cartoonish level, as he proclaims to John Marston that he doesn't like Jews, non-whites, Native Americans, Catholics, Fabians, socialists, homosexuals, Asians, British and women. He also claims the current situation is the work of the "Jewish British Catholic homosexual elite" to bring down America. About two minutes later, he leaves his store and is promptly ripped apart by some zombies while John looks on smoking a cigarette with a grin on his face.
    • Red Dead Redemption 2 continues this fine tradition.
      • Each of the KKK random encounters ends in this fashion, even if you don't involve yourself. In one, several members accidentally set themselves on fire trying to light a cross. In another, the cross falls over, killing two of them. If you do choose to involve yourself and kill them, you receive no negative repercussions.
      • There is a eugenicist in Saint Denis who is so hated by the rest of the town that you can kill him in broad daylight without repercussions.
      • After recovering the items from the foreclosed home of an old man who turns out to have been a former slave catcher, you can kill him on the spot and actually gain honor.
  • Downplayed in Saints Row 2; Jessica Parish, the Dark Mistress of Maero the Brotherhood leader, comments that Young Gun Carlos Mendoza reminds her of her old housekeeper and later has him tortured to death to spite the Saints. When the Boss finds out about this, and has to put Carlos out of his misery themselves, they furiously capture Jessica when she's making a bank withdrawal, lock her in the trunk of her car, and leave her at a monster truck rally, where her boyfriend unknowingly crushes her.
  • Garithos from Warcraft tries to take Lordaeron from its undead citizens on the grounds that, well, he just does not like zombies (or any other non-human race). Sylvanas has him eaten apart by ghouls because she had promised him control of Lordaeron in exchange for his aid against Balnazzar, which she had no intention of ever actually giving him.

    Webcomics 
  • Cyanide and Happiness:
    • "Speed Racist" is a short where a racist dies in a car crash, caused by speeding, after yelling "go back to Africa" to a black guy. This is a short, and not a comic, because it's three minutes of him lamenting (and debating) the irony of the situation, though it's not enough to save him.
    • The segregation era white people on the bus in "Too Much History" who demanded that the black driver go sit in the back despite being in the middle of driving, causing it to crash seconds later and leaving the driver the only one to get out alive.
  • In Prequel, the bandits from Dodger: Break the Law side story are shown to trade in Argonian slaves and talk about them in horribly racist ways, just in time for an Imperial agent, who was investigating them, to show up and cut down the whole gang.

    Web Original 
  • In a 3LAMESTUDIO video titled "Homer Simpson in Cuphead meets the Devil", Homer gets killed by the Devil from Cuphead after making racist jokes about him.
  • Rarity in DRESS.MOV of the PONY.MOV series forces illegal Mexican immigrants to make dresses for her. It doesn't end well.
  • A now-deleted entry from the SCP Foundation "The Racist Door". A door decoration that, when placed on a door, would attempt to injure any non-white person who tried to open it. A white supremacist doctor at the organization keeps it on his door for his amusement. Eventually, said doctor mysteriously dies after a prolonged illness. It is then determined that the doorway upon which the decoration is hung will, over time, slowly kill anyone who walks through it. The report concludes by suggesting the possible sentience of the item in its attempts to protect non-white races from the effect, and the note that "racism is not exclusive of Caucasians."

    Western Animation 
  • Celebrity Deathmatch:
    • The Derek Jeter vs. John Rocker fight begins with John Rocker stating that he hates New York City because of all the foreigners living there. This enrages Derek Jeter, so he shows no mercy to him. Eventually, Jeter uses a battery to electrocute him to death. (And for bonus irony points, his charred corpse resembles the Statue of Liberty.)
    • The Carlos Mencia vs. Dave Chappelle fight is also an example. Carlos Mencia is constantly making racist remarks and justifying himself by saying "people can't take a joke". He gets his just deserts at the end of the match when Dave Chappelle sics a dog on him and he bleeds out.
  • Hazbin Hotel: At least one of Alastor's victims is implied to have done himself in due to discrimination against him for being Creole. Given that they lived in New Orleans around the time of the Great Depression, it's very easy to assume that the victim, who was an elderly white man, marked himself for death by being racist towards a Serial Killer.
  • Young Justice (2010): The mysterious murder of the King of Mars, S'turnn J'axx, is revealed to be an accident caused by the Priestess S'yraa S'mitt. She and Prince J'emm had been in love and looking to marry, but they were forbidden from doing so by the King because of Mars' rigid Caste System. While King S'turrn was a progressive advocate for the equality of Green and White Martians, he still believed that the Red Martian royalty/nobility were superior. As a result, when S'yraa, a Green Martian, attempted to appeal to the King to allow her to marry his son, a Red Martian, he rejected her heartfelt plea and angrily turned her away. Upset at the King's contemptuous rejection, S'yraa's emotions caused her to lose control of her magic power, and she accidentally attacked him, resulting in his death.

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After a group of cops interrogate Jet Bean, one of the cops mocks Jet's nationality, leading to the cop getting kicked.

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