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“The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different—say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn't treat a man as the center of the universe—we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of society's folk ways, as counters in the game of society's ordaining, are outlawed.”
― Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918

“Further, when markers of race, gender, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and other factors are the only criteria considered in hiring or admissions, students are cheated, as are those chosen to meet diversity measures on the basis of identity alone. Nothing is more essentialist or constraining than diversity understood strictly in terms of identity.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“If it is true that education is the main foundation of any society, it follows that the state of race in today’s America mirrors its education system. Therefore, America’s education needs serious examination and even remaking. It is a system that uses Blacks (and other marginalized people) as mere tokens. You see a meager quota of Black people (as employees or students) here and there to give the false impression of equity.”
― Louis Yako

“Proximity to and even intimacy with BIPOC does not erase white privilege, unconscious bias, or complicity in the system of white supremacy. Being in a relationship with a BIPOC or having a biracial or multiracial child does not absolve a person with white privilege from the practice of antiracism.”
― Layla Saad, Me and White Supremacy: A Guided Journal: The Official Companion to the New York Times Bestselling Book Me and White Supremacy

“Tokenism is a promise to pay. Democracy, in its finest sense, is payment.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“This failure of nerve already was manifest in the selection and confirmation process of Clarence Thomas. Bush's choice of Thomas caught most black leaders off guard. Few had the courage to say publicly that this was an act of cynical tokenism concealed by outright lies about Thomas being the most qualified candidate regardless of race. Thomas had an undistinguished record as a student (mere graduation from Yale Law School does not qualify one for the Supreme Court); he left thirteen thousand age discrimination cases dying on the vine for lack of investigation in his turbulent eight years at the EEOC; and his performance during his short fifteen months as an appellate court judge was mediocre. The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent. The point here is not simply that if Thomas were white they would have no trouble shouting this fact from the rooftops. The point is also that their silence reveals that black leaders may entertain the possibility that the racist stereotype may be true.”
― Cornel West, Race Matters

“The whole point of being a token is that you exchange your rage at inequality for the respect and admiration of your peers. You trade in your right to be angry, to be dissatisfied, for the right to be hugged and affirmed by those around you. You stop pointing out the ways in which people are hurting you or making your identity feel impossible, and unless it is self-serving, you stop pointing out the fact that you are the only one like you. You take the fact that there is only one of you (or, in my case, that there are very few like you), and instead of treating that fact as what it is—damning evidence of exclusion and discrimination—you treat it as evidence that you are special.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“To sincerely adopt the psychology of tokenism, you have to sell your community out. That’s the dark underbelly of the thing. Instead of blaming the institutions, rules, and social attitudes of those around you for the absence of other people like you, you blame your own community”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“It is important to dedicate some space to discuss what one might call the hoax of diversity in the American workplaces, which entails putting ‘diverseâ€� faces of often low-paid employees at the forefront of most businesses to project the false impression that workplaces are diverse. It is pure tokenism.”
― Louis Yako

“In brief, if we do not seriously problematize diversity as practiced currently in our society, we all lose. The diverse people should take this more seriously than anyone else, because putting them at the forefront of the battlefield with low-paid jobs while making them look like they are 'stealing' someone else’s job opportunities is not worth the paychecks they are getting in the long run. It is no secret that this hoax of diversity has turned countless poor and marginalized White Americans into the biggest enemies of diversity in America. This negatively affects all diverse people who truly love and make important contributions to the American society.”
― Louis Yako

“Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses, and the masses are the ones who have the problem, not the few. That one who benefits from tokenism, he doesn’t want to be around us anyway—that’s why he picks up on the token”
― Malcolm X

“Gidbinna Puzzlebox Halving Tokens Ingot The Gold”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“I have lost track of the number of times when I chatted with DEI professionals or even diversity hires of different races and backgrounds who painfully told me that they are put in a position that makes them incapable of making any meaningful changes in their workplace. That their job is primarily to be tokenized and make the institution look and feel good, but in reality they â€� and any diverse person in their workplace â€� feel totally paralyzed in environments that look good, but are in fact extremely controlled by the few privileged at the top.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questionsâ€� published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako