Tokenism

The practice of including a limited number of members of some class or group of "others" within a group.

Suggests an insincere, half-hearted, or poorly thought out attempt to make things "look" open, diverse, non-discriminatory, without actually addressing the roots of the problem, either within the group or organization itself, or within society at large.

Within art or literature, tokenism is the practice of including a single representative of some class in the work. For instance, the "token female character" or the "token black character" in a TV show. Token characters demonstrate a number of problems within the larger narrative. Because the larger narrative is unrealistic in some fashion -- i.e., all white; all male; all upper class -- it is some kind of a fantasy world. The intrusion of a token character calls attention to that fantasy world, at the same time that it is an attempt -- typically a deliberate, conscious attempt -- to avoid criticism for the discriminatory unrealism of the work. But because the larger work is itself unrealistic, the "token" character cannot escape the anti-realism of the work -- for instance, the token character may be an inauthentic representative of their class (e.g., defined as queer but with no queer consciousness or experience of homophobia); characterized only by stereotypes; or have no real function or characterization other than their "role" (e.g., the woman is the wife; the black person is the sidekick; etc.

In other words, the unreality of the narrative presents a problem for authentically characterizing people within the work. The work itself relies on the stereotype of the "default" character (as, for example, white, male, middle/upper class, competent, psychologically whole, courageous, physically strong, etc.)., and any non-"default" characteristics are inscribed or marked as such. While the problems show up most evidently in the token character, they are implicitly problems of characterization for the non-token characters as well, and demonstrate a problem in world-building.

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