I’ve never heard that the black guy dies first. In fact, I find he’s frequently one of the last to go. But go he does.
One of my favorite movie cliches is related to Askia’s Expendable Negro, but is a little different. It is the False Ending, usually found in cheesy sci-fi movies and thrillers. And how do you know you have a False Ending on your hands?
We’ll turn to the excerable Leviathan and the hilariously awful Fortresss for two perfect examples:
Well, you start with a movie where a group of diverse individuals are stuck together in A Bad Situation. In Leviathan, they were stuck in a deep-sea mining vessel with a mutant sea-monster on the loose. In Fortress, they were in the jail of the future, where disobedient prisoners were killed off in gruesome ways by the artificially intelligent computer jailor.
Your Diverse Individuals should include a variety of different ethnicities, ages, etc. In Leviathan, they included your slutty female, your sleazy guy, your doctor-who-only-cared-about-himself, and of course, your all-around good buddy of a black guy, played by Ernie Hudson. In Fortress, you had your wise old black man, your super-nerd, and your effeminate Latino.
Make sure you have a Hero and a Love Interest. In Leviathan, our Hero was Peter Weller, and our Love Interest was one of his coworkers on the mining vessel. In Fortress, our Hero was Christopher Lambert, and the Love Interest was his pregnant wife, also being held in the prison.
The plot of the movie is that everyone trying to escape from The Bad Situation, but in doing so, they get killed one by one. The least sympathetic character or two will get killed off first. After that, the order of death is fairly random, with your more noxious characters going earlier than those who are supposed to be more likeable. The black guy doesn’t die first, as he is almost always a likeable character.
(Now, keep in mind that this type of set-up does not always lead to a False Ending. While it’s enough of a cliche that Roger Ebert dubbed it an “Ark Movie” in his Glossary of Movie Terms, it doesn’t have to be cheesy. Alien used this set-up to great advantage, though the lack of a Love Interest would have been a clue that things would come out a little differently. And of course, Stagecoach is the ultimate Ark Movie. But if it’s a crappy movie, chock-full of cliches and retreads of other movies, then it’s quite likely you’ll find a False Ending.)
Finally, the Hero, the Love Interest, and one of your Diverse Individuals escape to safety. The Diverse Individual should be either the black guy or some other identifiably ethnic male. In Leviathan, our Hero, the Love Interest, and the black guy swam to the surface of the ocean. In Fortress, our Hero, the Love Interest, and the effeminate Latino destroyed the computer, escaped the jail, and made it across the border to Mexico. We, the audience, are supposed to breathe a sigh of relief. Yay! It’s over! But the savvy viewer knows that Ernie Hudson is toast. He can’t possibly make it to the end of the movie alive. He is the Expendable Negro, after all. Same with the effeminate Latino.
So, in Leviathan, the mutant sea monster comes back for an encore and chomps poor Ernie, and in Fortress, the truck controlled by the computer jailor flattens our doomed effeminate Latino, leaving our lily-white Hero and Love Interest to celebrate their victory without having to deal with that pesky minority third wheel.
So, in the scenario of the False Ending, the black guy doesn’t die first, but you can be sure he dies eventually.