Token

The Orientalism lecture yesterday got me thinking about non-white representation in television and made me more aware than ever of the ‘Token black guy’.

While in some movies this notion is satirised quite well. In “Not Another Teen Movie” for instance, there is literally only one black character who sums up the 'token' trope saying: “Yeah I know, I’m the token black guy. I’m just supposed to smile, stay out conversations, and say things like ‘Dayum!’, ‘Shit!’, and ‘That is wack!’”. This ends up forming a funny scene where the token black guy is really confused to see another black character in one of the other scenes and asks him to leave: 

 






But while satirised in this film, it mostly just sneaks under the radar as an unfortunate discursive strategy (Herman Grey). As Sue mentioned in the lecture, Grey outlines 3 discursive practises that place non-white people in the media. In this post I will be discussing the first of these practises: Assimilation Discourses.

Grey states that the assimilation discourse is the sense of centrality of white values in media while still claiming diversity with a black/Asian supporting role. Basically it’s the token black guy discourse.

So as I said I have noticed this before and some media openly make fun of the discourse like “Not Another Teen Movie” and “South Park”, where the only black kid in the program is a recurring character named Token. But while I have noticed it I have not paid as much attention to it as I am now and I have noticed in my day and a half of clarity that popular television is a very big fan of Assimilation Discourses at the moment.

Take a show I was recently watching called “The 100”. The show is about a post-apocalyptic Earth where a group of humans survived by staying on a space station in Earths’ orbit. Of the three black cast members who had speaking roles, two were murdered in the first season (one in the third episode). That leaves just one black man, Thelonius Jaha, with a talking role (there have been no black women at all so far FYI). This seems somewhat surprising off the bat as one of the flags seen in the space station belonging to the surviving countries was the flag of Uganda…
While he was in a position of power at the beginning of the show, this last surviving token, I mean black man, Thelonius, is now a sort of antagonist character, spreading mysterious drugs around the camp of survivors and conversing with the women who destroyed the Earth in the first place.

When he wasn’t a naughty character though, he very much did align himself with white values and ideologies, putting practicality above all else, holding a democratic government no matter what and exhibiting a healthy family life (until his son got murdered in the third episode). He even rode a faulty missile to Earths’ surface to save just one baby. In fact, even now where he is an antagonistic character, the values he’s undermining with his antagonistic ways are white values and priorities. He seeks to alter peoples’ minds with drugs and even leads an exhibition of about twelve people, stealing food and guns from the (noticeably white) home camp, on a fruitless religious journey that ends up getting all but 2 of them killed. Drugs, stealing, and pointless religious journeys are all frowned upon in the modern white society and thus Thelonius, the last living black man, has become an enemy to white values.

Thank you for reading.