"Instead of an agenda, the Black people [at the 2020 RNC] were just there to say, 'Thank you, white folks,' and fade off-screen." In related news, obsessive Trump-thankers Diamond & Silk have one of the top-selling books in America. thenation.com/article/politi… thenation.com/article/politi…
PS/ This great article got me thinking about tokenism in ways that I hadn't before, especially the idea that tokenism requires the tokenized person to not have any political agenda, but merely to be thankful—and spin a narrative that reflects well on those doing the tokenizing.
PS2/ As someone who received a Jewish education growing up, I know that, in America, Judaism, honorably conceived, is as much about social justice as religious traditions and history. Trump's tokenized Jews have lots of Big Feelings about Israel—and no interest in social justice.
PS3/ The evangelical Christians who—with Trump—are tokenizing Jews have the very same Big Feelings about Israel that the tokenized Jews do. So as long as the tokenized Jews support maintaining Israel more or less as it is—in preparation for Jesus' return—they're allowed to speak.
PS4/ But it's impossible for me to imagine a Trumpist Jew being given the freedom to say Judaism's emphasis on social justice means aggressively reexamining (1) Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, *and* (2) how religion is used by the GOP to wage war on the poorest Americans.
PS5/ I do wonder about exceptions: tokenized persons who present as having an agenda. If so, does it always mirror the tokenizers' agenda? Is any deviation allowed? For instance, Candace Owens has an incoherent worldview, but does it ever cohere in any way divergent from the GOP?
PS6/ One might imagine that the political value of a token—no matter the demographic in play or the purpose of the tokenizing—is measurable in the following sense: how much deviation the token is permitted from either "agenda silence" or the party line. But that erases something:
PS7/ If tokens, across all contexts, are readily available—because the value paid out to the token (either in literal capital or cultural capital) is so high that the line to be tokenized ends up being quite long—only those who agree not to "deviate" are "permitted" to be tokens.
PS8/ With Trumpist Jews, I imagine the calculus is further made unique by the fact that there's an actual agenda overlap with evangelicals that perhaps makes some of the tokens kid themselves into thinking they're something else: *valued* and *essential* proponents of an agenda.
PS9/ I guess what I'm saying is, there can be situations in which tokens have agendas, and in which those agendas overlap with the tokenizers' agenda, and in which the token therefore is permitted to have an agenda, but all that does is more deeply embed and obscure the tokenism.
PS10/ All of which would mean, I think, that, as implied by the excellent article I linked to atop this thread, tokenism is actually defined by an absence rather than a presence: the absence of the freedom to deviate idiosyncratically from the agenda advocated by one's tokenizer.
NOTE/ This helps us confirm that even when the DNC brought out Kasich at its convention he wasn't being tokenized—as no effort at all was made to obscure, in the lead-up to the DNC, all the ways in which Kasich's political views would be idiosyncratic in *any* Democratic context.
