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.

Characterization

Characterization of 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 a kind of unrealistic fantasy world (but not usually the one the authors were intentionally trying to create). 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.

Thus, tokenism occurs at different levels within characterization.

• Token identity: A character might be a token representative in one aspect of their identity; in other words, a character who is critical to the narrative, who is given some ethnic, gender, or other identity; but that identity is never explored and does not seem "central" to the character.
• Token characters: A character might be wholly a token, included only as a role or even completely not essential to the plot.

Plot

Token characters also present plot issues. For instance, a story structure that does not incorporate any consciousness of race or ethnicity dynamics, history, etc., at all, but includes a character who has a token ethnic identity, will sometimes run into problems of realism when they attempt to put the (token) character in a situation in which it is perfectly obvious to the audience that racial issues would come up. For instance, a story that took place in the US South in the 1950s, featuring a gang of kids, and one kid who is "black", will run into problems as the kids grow into adolescence. If the story does not deal with the racism that the children would encounter, especially if romantic relationships were involved, then the story is completely anti-realistic to a point that the audience couldn't really suspend their disbelief. On the other hand, if the story does deal with the racism, after having never treated racism as a factor in their characterizations before -- the life history of the various kids, for instance -- then doing so now will be suddenly abrupt and jarring. (Obviously this could be done as an intentional effect, to show the intrusion of race consciousness; but such works have typically treated race throughout the work in a way that was apparent to the audience, although the characters were oblivious of it.) This can result in a "very special episode" kind of feel to serial works or simply a disjunctive unreal feel to any work, resulting in complaints of various sorts from the audience, who feel either cheated by the disruption to the character arc; cheated by the intrusion of reality; cheated by the realization that the work was so anti-realistic to begin with; etc.

Examples

• "Token Black" on South Park is a parody of the token character.
• Ajihad in "Eragon" (Wikipedia explanation: "The author does not explain where black people came from, and Ajihad and his daughter are the only black people in the entire book. Ajihad is in about 1/6 of Eragon, and dies at the beginning of Eldest."
• Token team members

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