eli5: what is/how does tokenism work?
In: 7
Tokenism is pretending you’re trying to be inclusive when, in fact, your “efforts” are just smoke and mirrors and all you’re doing is namedropping minorities or underprivileged groups in order to seem virtuous.
It’s a technique for deflecting criticisms of bigotry while making it seem as though you have the support of a minority group on your side.
It’s pretty simple to do. You find one member of a minority group who agrees (or is willing to pretend to agree) with your agenda. You “tokenize” them, by having them speak on behalf of the entire minority group they’re a part of. Now you can pretend the whole minority group agrees with you, because the opinion of your token person supposedly represents their group’s opinion.
As an added bonus, you can use them as a shield to deflect all criticisms of being bigoted towards that minority group.
In education it’s where you give a very surface level teaching of something.
Say you’re an Australian teacher and you’re teaching about Aboriginal Australians. So, you get your kids to paint some Aboriginal flags and hang them up around the classroom. You might mention a couple of important dates in Australian Aboriginal history but that’s about it. It doesn’t go under the surface.
This could just be because you don’t understand the topic well enough to teach it beyond that. You’ve given a token amount about it but that’s it.
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