Angry: Token

"I'm just your token black."

The words wounded her deeply, coming from someone she had considered close as family. How could he say such a thing, after all they'd been through.

When a dear friend of mine shared this experience with me some time I ago, I focused on being a friend to someone who was deeply hurt. It wasn't the time for explanations. But I knew immediately I wanted to explore this idea of tokenism in this series. What does that mean? To have a "token" black friend. Or to be one?

I don't think there's any white person in the world that fills a quota on the number of friends of color they have. No one thinks, "Well, I need to have at least one, maybe two or three black friends. There's this person, my colleague at work, and. . Sean. Perfect! I'm all set."  So tokens are not consciously "chosen" to check a box off the list. (At least not in people's personal lives. When it comes to marketing, that's a whole other story).

I also don't believe that a white person is required to have a few or many black friends. Our nation is still 60% white and in many places it may not even be possible to have a multitude of differently-melinated friends. So I'm not suggesting that you're duty bound to seek out black people for your social set--doing that indeed feels a bit like. ..tokenism.

So if white people aren't trying to meet a black friend quota and they don't have a responsibility to populate their lives with black people, then what's the big deal about tokenism?  I see two issues where tokenism arises:  First, it's assuming that the black person you know (or don't know if he or she happens to appear in a Turning Point video) gives you all the information you need to know about the black experience. If you don't have a wide black circle--more than just a few black friends; if you don't spend time in what we call black spaces (such as attending a black church, living in a neighborhood with a high percentage of black people, attending a black school, working with mostly black people) you need to be especially careful about assuming you understand the experiences, challenges, issues, and needs of people of color. The small sample set you have with those few friends, associates, or colleagues is simply not large enough to give you a truly informed perspective. 

Further, having any number of black friends--but especially a few--should never serve as proof of your not being a racist. This is how those friends become tokens.  Some people treat relationships with black people like tokens at an arcade.  They are "proof " that they hope to exchange at the counter for that "Not a Racist" label on the high shelf over there. Again, I don't think this is something white people consciously think about or plan.  But there's a reason "some of my best friends are black" is a phrase well-known and generally held in derision. It's a go-to argument when the discussion takes an uncomfortable turn.

Now, if you really want to move past token experiences, and seek out diversity, that is a worthy goal. But it's important to understand that having a truly diverse social setting involves more than token representation of people of color.  If you want, or you want your child to really experience diversity go to a black school, attend a black church (or a majority of any other non-white ethnicity), or, if you dare, live in a majority non-white neighborhood (or just don't move if your neighborhood appears to be "browning"). For black people who want their child to experience diversity, you're not going to achieve that sending them to a majority white school with some Asians, blacks, and Latinos thrown into the mix for flavor.  I always wanted my children to have a diverse environment during their growing up years. I always thought we'd achieve that by living overseas for some period during their childhood, but that doesn't appear to be panning out. But our choice to send them to a predominantly black school accomplished the same goal. How is it diverse if practically everybody is black? Because the dominant culture is already white.  They get that everywhere. It's on the billboards, on the TV shows and movies, it's practically in the air.  Diverse, in this country, means non-white. If you want diversity you have to go to explicitly nonwhite spaces. 

This is not a diverse group, no matter what the Google image search tells you.

But my kid won't be comfortable if he/she is different from everyone else. Actually, your kid--especially if they are very young--will be just fine (you might actually be more concerned about your own discomfort than theirs, if we are being honest). Kids truly don't "see" race until we teach it to them. I remember my son Ezra when he was maybe three, telling me that he was afraid of the "brown man." I asked him if I was a brown man. And he said, "No, you're bwaack!" My heart sank, shocked to realize that at that tender age he already had absorbed racial categories. But then he went on to say that he was blue, his brother was red, his mom was pink, his aunt was orange and so on. It turned out the brown man was a most definitely white neighbor.

I think white people tend to overestimate the amount of hate they will experience from black people because of their color. In black spaces racial hatred isn't backed up by the assumptions of the larger society, so if a black person is going to exhibit prejudice towards a white person, they're pretty much speaking for themselves. The wider culture is not echoing their hate. And it's that echo from society that makes racism from whites so much more painful than the occasional sting of a slur or insult in and of itself (I will unpack this more in an upcoming blog post).

So you have black friends. Wonderful. Continue to cherish them. Just remember that their presence in your life doesn't earn you a prize.