“How many times have I held my tongue in order to uphold your comfortable lifestyle?” is the question I ask myself in class when I am reprimanded by my classmates and professors for applying theory to my world, our classrooms and this campus. My professors scold me and my classmates yell at me. Well, not all of the time. Sometimes, I say something that interests them, and so I become their token. It is only these times when I have something important to say. Other times I am misunderstood, misusing the information I learn. However, whenever I speak as a Black woman, I am then credited with all of the authority in the world, but only to speak as a Black woman. When I say anything outside of what they deem to be within the constraints of my Black womanhood, as determined by those who are not Black women, I am constructed as a crazy Black woman who needs to sit down, shut up and learn from the fruit of her white supremacist education.
After being yelled at by one of my white female classmates for the second time, I think that it is time that I speak on what it is to be a token, to tokenize and how this needs to stop. The idea behind tokens is that there is a living, breathing resource for straight, rich, white, male people to learn from in the classroom. However this resource is only to be respected when it speaks as a resource, when it steps away from this imposed identity, its input is no longer valuable.
I used to think tokenizing in classrooms was only when one spoke from their experience for the benefit of those persons in the class who are foreign to that experience. I refused to disclose my experiences to those ignorant persons who looked to consume me as their other. Now I recognize that when marginalized people don’t speak from their experience as marginalized people, the entire social order of the classroom is disrupted. It is disrupted because our education is built on “othering” those people who don’t fit into those invisible norms of identity: whiteness, maleness, straightness, upper middle classness, et al. Therefore, those tokenized are ignored.
Since I uncovered this phenomenon, I now consciously choose when I will play the token in my classes. I don’t do it when I am in classes where I am unsupported, where there isn’t a critical mass of people who I know identify like me. I choose to only when I know everyone in the classroom has been given the same challenge and is working to meet that challenge. I do have classrooms where I gain power when I speak from my experience; where I am not invalidated when I don’t speak from my experience, classrooms where tokenization is not the invisible driving force to education. And it is in these classes that I thrive and flourish, because my contributions are respected, not scrutinized.
Tokenizing maintains that -isms only affect those persons who are discriminated against, not those who benefit from the state of our world. It is time that there is a new story written, a story that represents how everyone is affected and how many contribute to the very oppression that many are fighting to demolish. By ignoring these hegemonic structures, the very foundation of one’s oppression and privilege is upheld and maintained. Change is postponed because “othering” is privileged over deconstruction. And this is what happened when my white female classmate yelled at me; she discredited everything I said because in my deconstructions I was taking away the foundations her privilege is built upon. So I get painted as the crazy Black woman who doesn’t know how to participate properly in academic discussion. But she was yelling.
So the next time anyone has the urge to construct me as a castrating angry Black woman, ask yourself: why do you have to do that to listen and respect what I am saying? Why are stereotypes and controlling images the only resources you can use to value my participation in the classroom? Why must I expose my most personal and painful moments in order for my statements to be valued? Why don’t you have to? Why is it that my “objective” statements are only respected when a white man takes them and speaks them as if they are his own? Why am I asking these questions?
Leave a Reply