The tokenizing logic of some of the aforementioned black NGO workers was also not disconnected from their own identities nor was it free of theory. One person I have in mind was a former panther and pretty on top of things. Employing the false logic of tokenization does not mean a person is wrong or invalid or "other" in all the various ways a person can be in that situation.

Tokenization is rampant on this instance and is a key example of internalized liberalism and part of why the Western left is anemic. It prioritizes splitting and escalating grievances over mutual education and humility, and one of the main weapons for doing this is blurring the lines wrt tokenization. I'm certainly familiar with this, it's the main thing I focus on in new organizing spaces, as it determines how much humility I can safely show. Toxic environments do not allow for productive self-crit, they reward those most willing to insult and fight and you cannot show weakness. Normally, this just means not reacting and not offering very much engagement in this first place: put one's energy elsewhere.

I have another irl example. I helped a coalition group organize in solidarity with Palestine. They adopted an anti-tokenization stance, but had weak and undemocratic structure, non-existent political education outside of what my org introduced (it was well-received, people usually like these things when they are organized), and later invited an Arab org to participate (Arab group as in, definitely proclaimed itself Arab and excluded non-Arabs). That group ultimately took over the unstructured group using self-tokenizing logic. They included other ideas and arguments, of course, but those were ultimately rejected. When emotions were high and people afraid of state reprisal, that group expressed frustration and began condescendingly telling others how only their group should be the voice anyone listens to and they had decided to disband the coalition. This worked on enough people that the project fell apart. There were more Arab people (from other orgs) there who disagreed with them, but this didn't matter as the white people were already cowed and had their excuse for not taking any risks. Oh, and they exploited doing this in an ad hoc meeting when other orgs were resting. The tokenization here did not happen free of context or theory and those who ran with it seemed authentic to me. They were actually frustrated and not feeling listened to. They really seemed to believe they could boil the situation down to white people not listening to those who knew better because of their connections to the region and upbringings. They simply ignored the other Arabs in the coalition, placing all focus on the white people with identical positions. They were also incorrect in their analysis and were frustrated, in part, because they had no real response to correct feedback. Tokenization emerged as an effective weapon for resolving a situation in favor of their preferred course of action, following a series of other ideas about what should be done and why.

Tokenizing logic is always invalid and is harmful to organizing.