Racist Zoro / Minority Hunter Zoro (2024)

About

Racist Zoro, also known as "Minority Hunter Zoro" is a meme in the One Piece fandom which portrays the long-term character Roronoa Zoro, as a closet racist who loves fighting and slaying the dark-skinned or black coded characters he encounters. This is due to Zoro's major opponents throughout the series being almost exclusively dark-skinned, and due to other trivial facts about Zoro himself, such as his would-be job in the real world being a police officer and his favorite food being white rice, while his least favorite being chocolate.

Origin

One of the first mentions of Zoro being racist can be traced to 4chan, on the board /a/, where on February 23rd, 2021, an anonymous user posted a manga panel in which Zoro refers to Fishman character Arlong as a "darn, dirty half-fish" (shown, below).^[1]

The meme itself originated on October 1st, 2021, with the earliest examples of them being mentioned on both /a/ and Reddit. On /a/, an anonymous user called Zoro a racist once again for his insult towards Arlong (shown below).^[2]

In the same thread, the anonymous user posted a collage of Zoro's oppents consisting mainly of dark-skinned and black coded characters (shown below, left) and posting Zoro's would-be real job in the real world: Police Officer (shown below, right).

On the same day, on the subreddit r/OnePiece, user Leonboi64 made a thread titled "Zoro is racist", giving credit to Twitter and Worstgen user wraithery.^[3] Although given credit, there is no online post or comment on wraithery's profiles about Zoro being racist.^[4]^[5] The Reddit thread, going on great lengths to showcase Zoro's racism (in a clearly humorous and ironic way), received over 16,400 points in 11 months (shown below).

Spread

The meme caught traction on YouTube, with several content creators finding out about it and sharing it with their followers. On October 7th, 2021, That One Piece Talk uploaded a video called "Did Oda MAKE Zoro a Racist?".^[6] The podcast joked about Zoro's racism, mentioning mostly the points brought up in Leonboi64's thread. The video received over 7,800 views and 234 likes in 11 months

On October 14th, 2021, Twitch streamer and YouTuber Blank Thoughts uploaded a video titled "ZORO Is A Racist CONFIRMED??!!!", receiving over 47,500 views and 1,900 likes in 11 months.^[7]

On January 11th, 2022, YouTuber chrisdlln uploaded "Is Zoro from One Piece racist?!", garnering over 50,600 views and 2,200 likes in 8 months (shown below, left).^[8] Part 2 was uploaded 3 days later on January 14th, which received over 15,900 views and 835 likes (shown below, right).^[9]

On January 26th, 2022, Eustassunlucky uploaded a video titled "Why zoro is racist 100% not even imo", which received over 1,074,000 views and 94,000 likes in 7 months (shown below, left).^[10] On April 12th, 2022, Eustassunlucky uploaded a video on the same topic titled "ZORO IS RACIST (completed timeline)", which received over 134,000 views and 11,000 likes in 5 months (shown below, right).^[11]

On August 2nd, 2022, Imsadil Skits uploaded a video titled "Racist Anime Characters" featuring Frieza from the Dragon Ball series, Tobirama Senju from Naruto and finally Zoro, mentioning the nickname "Minority Hunter". The video received over 14,100 views and 985 likes in one month.^[12]

On August 26th, 2022, YouTuber Mykal Davis included a Racist Zoro segment in his video about Black Frieza titled "Black Frieza Is A True N*gga", which received over 790,000 views and 55,000 likes in 4 weeks.^[13]

On TikTok

On June 25th, 2022, TikToker @zorosimpedits posted a video captioned "The minority hunter", which received over 227,000 views and 28,800 likes (shown below, left).^[14] On August 26th, 2022, @gokublackkai10 posted a video about Zoro being racist, which received over 391,000 views and 96,700 likes in 4 weeks (shown below, right).^[15]