How to Use tokenism in a Sentence

tokenism

noun
  • Did the company choose her for her merits, or merely as an act of tokenism?
  • The fetishization of black outlawry is the new tokenism.
    Armond White, National Review, 20 Sep. 2023
  • After the murder of George Floyd, it could be argued that tokenism has been on the rise.
    Janice Gassam Asare, Forbes, 1 May 2022
  • Money gets you in to either party, and tokenism does too.
    Keith C. Burris, Star Tribune, 14 Aug. 2020
  • There was some carping by those who felt the statement didn’t go far enough, or was typical tokenism.
    Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 8 Jan. 2018
  • Yeoh also goes deep on tokenism, aging and why she’s been praying every night to win an Oscar.
    Los Angeles Times, 7 Feb. 2023
  • The answer to change isn't tokenism: casting one model from a marginalized group, or doing a one-off show that highlights a marginalized group.
    Jessica Andrews, Teen Vogue, 29 Sep. 2017
  • Some may say, rightly so, that embracing this unicorn status is a form of tokenism.
    Deeptee Jain, Forbes, 1 Jan. 2022
  • But the show is clever in its sendup of those homogenous environments and never feels like an outsider’s guide to tokenism.
    Bethonie Butler, Washington Post, 12 Sep. 2023
  • Chatfield says that the producers wanted to avoid tokenism, as well as stereotyped portrayals of people of colour on the show.
    Alicia Vrajlal, refinery29.com, 20 June 2023
  • Even away from the shadows of the street corners and dark alleyways, the pervasive nature of tokenism in media creates the same tension.
    Ashlee Marie Preston, Harper's BAZAAR, 6 July 2021
  • The name of the podcast is intentionally meant to dismiss the tokenism that is sometimes assigned to women.
    Emily Iannaconi, Forbes, 12 Nov. 2021
  • But the assistant isn’t interested in the tokenism of becoming the first Black coach in a championship game.
    Stephen Humphries, The Christian Science Monitor, 10 Dec. 2021
  • This creates a culture of tokenism, a system that treats students of color like pawns in a game of virtuous facades.
    WSJ, 8 Nov. 2022
  • The offer smacked of cliché, another act of holiday tokenism.
    Grayson Haver Currin, New York Times, 15 Aug. 2022
  • Some members told me that there also seems to be a sense of tokenism in the industry—the idea that only a few instructors of color can attain fame in the white world of fitness.
    SELF, 1 Sep. 2020
  • When Graham was the only plus-size model on Kors’ fall 2017 runway, the brand was both celebrated and called out for tokenism.
    Lauren Chan, Glamour, 17 Aug. 2017
  • There will be talk of appropriation, tokenism, and theft.
    John Ortved, Vogue, 21 May 2017
  • For me, avoiding tokenism … has been looking for roles where the character doesn’t only exist as a means to tell somebody else’s story.
    Time Staff, Time, 28 May 2021
  • New Zealand's Parliament has had Māori seats since 1867, soon after the country was founded, but these have sometimes been seen as tokenism.
    Julia Hollingsworth, CNN, 16 Nov. 2020
  • Every day still there’s still resistance for curvy women in the industry, and there is tokenism for curvy women in the industry.
    Janelle Okwodu, Vogue, 11 Oct. 2018
  • But talking to the producers quickly dispelled his fears of tokenism in a splashy period reboot.
    Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 2023
  • Critics say quotas can lead to tokenism, rather than deeper cultural change.
    Fortune, 12 July 2019
  • Ely, who is now a business professor at Harvard, had hit upon a dynamic known as tokenism.
    Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, 2 Aug. 2017
  • Tokenism can play out on a larger scale as well, giving the impression that the industry is transforming, when in reality, the changes are small.
    Valeriya Safronova, New York Times, 16 Mar. 2017
  • Instead, Trans Hilarious, debuting tonight at the Pack Theater, aims to avoid tokenism by changing things up and showing that there are as many ways to be trans as there are to be funny.
    Los Angeles Times, 17 Mar. 2022
  • Whether or not the company can evolve remains to be seen, and critics have already labeled Sampaio’s casting a case of tokenism, an attempt to win goodwill in the court of public opinion.
    Janelle Okwodu, Vogue, 8 Aug. 2019
  • There’s a certain kind of racist tokenism that is an underlying connotation with that.
    Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Scanning videos for blackface or searching text files for the n-word is so much easier than contending with, say, the systemic tokenism of TV rom-coms or the unbearable whiteness of Jane Austen.
    Ron Charles, Washington Post, 3 July 2020
  • Its own structural weakness is the contrived tokenism with which viewers are presumably meant to identify.
    Chicago Reader, 19 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tokenism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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