The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Not content to live with tokenism in any context I recently participated in an anti-racism workshop, and we discussed the concept of tokenism. Tokenism is being the one black student in a classroom full of white students. It’s being the only Hispanic em
my white classmates. I learned this after my firstgrade teacher called my parents and told them what I had said.
When I declared that I would attend Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University instead of applying to Yale like my mother dreamed I would, my father scoffed, “We could have just sent you to public school if you were going to go a historically black college,” as if the college preparatory skills that I learned at Hopkins would go to waste at an institution meant for black students — as if historically black colleges were remedial or for black students who did not have the grades or the SAT scores to get into white colleges. Many HBCUs were established for black students in the 1800s after they were rejected from other universities because of their skin color. Nowadays, black students opt to attend HBCUs because they want to live and learn amongst students and faculty who look like they do. I was one of them.
So when my college counselor said I would be a great match for George Washington University, I cringed at the thought of spending another four years of being “the fly in the buttermilk,” as my great-grandmother called being the only black person in a group of white people.
After graduating from college, many of my work environments were white, except now I was better equipped to deal with them because of my upbringing. The same rules applied, except I was working with white managers who could keep black employees out of their departments or organizations or fire me if I went from playing my part as the token to complaining about being the token.
As an adult in predominately white work environments, my quest has been to figure out how use my access to white spaces to help other black people be successful.