Tokenism

Tokenism is the practice of making a merely perfunctory or symbolic effort to include members of oppressed or minority groups.

Social change does not occur through tokenism or exceptions to the rule of discrimination, but through the systemic abolishment of the rule itself. ~ Cherríe Moraga

Quotes

• True coalition is not a smattering of tokens. True coalition forms between groups, the premise is that each group has a strong base in a larger community.
  • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1986)

• Nothing neutralizes creativity quicker than tokenism, that false sense of security fed by a myth of individual solutions.
  • Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

• Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018), p. 127

• Grassroots feminists continue to be undermined by single-issue liberals who believe that by breaking a class-entitled glass ceiling—'beating the boys at their own game'—there is some kind of "trickle down" effect on the actual lives of workingclass and poor women and children. This is the same "trickle down" of our share of corporate profit, secured by tax benefits for the wealthy, that has yet to land on our kitchen tables, our paychecks, or our children's public school educations. Social change does not occur through tokenism or exceptions to the rule of discrimination, but through the systemic abolishment of the rule itself.
  • Cherríe Moraga, "Catching Fire: Preface to the Fourth Edition," This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition (SUNY Press: 2015), p. xvii

See also

• Glass ceiling
• Social justice