The ‘T’ Word

When I was studying at New College at Oxford, one of my classmates was a black woman named Linda Bailey. One of the subjects we discussed was the promotion of Benjamin “Chappy” James to be the Air Force’s first black four-star general. She said, quite dismissively, “He’s probably just a token.” My retort was that General James was going to be the CO of NORAD (North American Air Defense), which does not strike me as a responsibility you want to give to a man you’re using only as window dressing. I’ve thought of Linda’s comment many times over the years. When Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. became the US Army’s first black brigadier general in October of 1940, was he a token? I would say, definitely yes. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall made him Inspector General of Colored Troops. A bit more than twenty-five years later, when Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. became the Army’s first lieutenant general (three stars), was he a token? While some people might think so, I would disagree.

Once, while attending a weekend drill at an Indiana National Guard armory in 1985, I happened upon an Indiana Army National Guard yearbook from the late 1940s. Apparently, it contained a photo of every Indiana National Guardsman serving that year. As I leafed through page after page, I couldn’t help but notice that every face was white. That is, until I came across one, yes one, all-black unit of about forty men. They were stretcher bearers. I distinctly recall that they had one black first lieutenant and one black second lieutenant. Were those men tokens? Definitely.

A decade later, I was drilling with a unit of the Ohio Army National Guard when I met a young black man, a Captain Alexander. I asked him if he had ever met the adjutant general of the Ohio Army National Guard: Major General Clifford Alexander. (Sometimes referred to as “Alexander the Pretty Darn Good.”) His reply was, “all the time; that man is my father.” I would find it very difficult to see how anyone could argue that Major General Alexander is a token.

By the same token (there’s that word again), when I was in high school, I often heard of some black community leaders advocating greater representation of minorities in the ranks of the Columbus Police Department. For more than a decade, the Columbus Chief of Police has been a man named James Jackson. Unless someone can demonstrate to me that he has no authority of responsibility, I don’t see how you can call him a token.

Some time ago, when I pointed out that, while there are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of George W. Bush, if you want to call him a racist, I find it hard to reconcile that position with him having picked not one, but two blacks as Secretary of State, the first two to ever hold that position. (When Ronald Reagan picked Samuel Pierce to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a charge of tokenism might very well have been justified.) But if you’re going to call Bush a racist, think about this: The Ku Klux Klan would not have approved of his appointments.

I got an e-mail from a high school classmate dismissing Powell and Rice as tokens, adding, “They’re as black as I am.” Since this is an old friend with a temper that is, at times, as volatile as mine, I will try to adapt a mellow and only mild sarcastic tone when I enquire when she got certified as the authority as to who is and is not a token and who is and is not black. Mild sarcasm: she did, after all, grow up in a small shotgun shack on Halsted Road, picking cotton until her fingers bled, wuhkin’ foe da man every night and day. If, in fact, Powell and Rice were both tokens after each had served as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, would someone please be so kind as to enlighten me: was Henry Kissinger a token Jew? And if Condoleezza Rice is a token woman, then why can’t the same label be attached to Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton?

I’m trying very hard to take a conciliatory, non-inflammatory tone here, but I wonder if anybody who calls Condoleezza Rice “not really black” is familiar with the story of Leslie McNair and reconsider their position. Leslie McNair was a grade-school classmate of Ms. Rice who was killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Condoleezza Rice was close enough to hear the explosion. If she hadn’t had the fortune to be the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she might have been killed in the explosion herself.

I’m afraid that the slur of “not really black” is a boilerplate slur used by left-wingers against any black person whose politics disappoint them.