Dear Token Black Man: You Don’t Have to Play Safe for White People
Yes, you. The one in all of the photographs.
Look, I get it.
For as long as I can remember, in many of my childhood and adult circles of friends, I have been the only Black guy. Just yesterday, I scrolled through my timelines, as I’m sure you may have done during this age of heightened racial and social tensions. It reminded me that my Blackness is now weaponized, visible, and no longer in the comfortable hiding place where some parts of our society have deemed it less threatening, less intimidating, and less Black.
When I was younger, I was the only kid out of a group of Black kids allowed to attend a Southern Baptist church’s field trip event because I was essentially told that I was one of the “good ones.” That same year, my best friend’s mom — who was as racist as one could get — reminded me that I was one of the “good ones,” so I had nothing to worry about.
1986 in the South. Oh, the good old days.
Even as a 10-year-old back then, the tone of my voice was deemed proper, safe for the White folks around me. At the time, I felt like I was between a typical 10-year-old kid and a future threatening, angry Black teenager, fighting for his identity. This “comfort” zone, as I would learn later in life, would directly land me as a token for many of my White friends in both personal and professional settings.
Peggy McIntosh, who wrote the incredible essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” said it best:
We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet, some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.
When I read this, I realized that I get to take back my Black power in the form of any privilege I’ve managed to secure. But what of unearned privilege? How does that get handled, understood, or leveraged by any community?
As a young man, I felt torn between my Blackness and the exception to my Blackness in how people around me adjusted. Friends would automatically change their car radios to the most…
