I've had parts of this essay simmering in the back of my mind for many years, since college at least and probably longer. For some reason, this article caused the last piece to fall into place; here is the key section:

Representative Filner said he wants the military to demonstrate that confronting and dealing with mental health is something they encourage. "The army and marines should take a midlevel officer, who admitted he had PTSD and was treated for it, and promote him to general so people know that the culture accepts it rather than a stigma being against it," said Filner.

My first thought was this: There is a powerful stigma imposed on military personnel with mental injuries, and soldiers are discouraged (or sometimes more actively prevented) from seeking or continuing diagnosis and treatment for it. So promoting one PTSD officer would be tokenism of the worst kind, simply giving the military someone to point to and say, "See? See? There's no stigma, we have a PTSD general," while continuing the disastrous status quo.

My second thought was this: A general has a substantial amount of power. Put the right person in that position and s/he could work to change the context. S/he could do things to help other PTSD sufferers get treatment, to prevent other officers from ruining those people's careers, and to assist them in moving up the ranks so as to broaden the number of officers working on those problems. If that happened, then the problem could be deconstructed and solved.

Underlying all of that was a long-standing conviction of mine that there was something fundamental missing from the "tokenism" debate. A "token" is a person with a particular feature -- a woman, a black person, a soldier with PTSD, etc. -- who is given a position usually held by someone who doesn't have that feature. It is considered an act of oppression. Always nagging at me was an awareness that somebody has to be first, that there has to be a way to break the dam, and that we're unlikely to find it if we discard all one-spot promotions as "tokenism." Because that's as dismissive of the promoted person as the oppressors' attitude is!

So that's what-all sparked this realization ...

The difference between a token and a representative or an advocate is that a token is selected because of a certain feature, but not given anything to do for it, just the ordinary duties inherent to the position. A representative is there to stand for all the other people with that feature, to give them a face and a voice, including the process of identifying and discussing why there are so few of them in this context that a single one stands out. An advocate studies what those people need, how to provide it and raise awareness of it, especially in pursuit of helping them to develop the skills, resources, and opportunities needed for advancement. An effective token will always stand out, tapping off the pressure to allow others to advance by maintaining the illusion that they already can. An effective representative or advocate will eventually disappear in the throng, wiping away their own status as such by making it superfluous as more people join that rank.

This illuminates some very useful aspects of oppression and how to dismantle it.

1) Attitude matters. If the contextual group desires a token, that's what they'll push for, and change will be slow and difficult. If the contextual group favors diversity, much faster and easier progress is possible -- but they must communicate clearly that they want someone capable of representation and/or advocacy, and explore with that person how to make it work, or else they'll be mistaken for people who just want a token.

2) Teamwork matters. Just because the contextual group is resistant to change doesn't make it unbreachable. It's usually possible to ram through a single member if you keep battering away at the barrier. If you stop at the token stage, you're letting the oppressors win. Aim for a spearhead and keep pushing to widen the access. Consider that once upon a time, Irish immigrants were intensely oppressed; one thing they did was make a concerted effort to get some of their youths onto the police force, which worked so well that "Irish cop" became a cliche. By this time they've faded into the mainstream. Anti-Semitism used to be a huge problem, and has lessened substantially -- in no small part because the Jews determined to produce a large number of lawyers. Women have cracked the glass ceiling but not broken it. One reason for that limited success is that, while some female executives mentor younger colleagues, many do not -- they treat other women as competition and work against them, which aids the overall oppression by blocking younger women out of the higher ranks.

So there are some tools we can use to replace oppression with participation. It's a lot of work. Any time you bring in someone who stands out because of a notable feature, it's going to create some friction -- if for no other reason than they'll have a different perspective than other folks. Our qualities shape our experiences, and that affects how we perceive and process both problems and opportunities. If you want a diverse group, you have to be willing to accept some extra processing effort in exchange for a greatly expanded idea pool and problem-solving parallax. Not everyone is willing to do that, which is one thing that makes oppression popular: it's easier in some ways than mingling is.

Activists sometimes try to gloss over this by saying "we're all the same underneath." No, we're not. That's the whole point. If we were all the same, we wouldn't have disagreements, we wouldn't have a wide range of abilities and ideas, and oppression would be irrelevant so it wouldn't happen. With very few exceptions, a person's salient features don't affect what they could do but may significantly effect how things are done. Your features affect the kind of opportunities and choices you have, the kind of experiences you have, and those things color the approaches you develop for moving through life. The wider the experience base, the higher the chance your group will have someone capable of a prompt and appropriate response to whatever happens. The narrower the experience base, the more and worse trouble you're likely to be in when faced by something outside it -- and the larger the range of "outside it" is. Think of an ecosystem: the more diverse its community of plants and animals, the more robust it is and the better it can withstand minor to major stresses. The less diverse or the more specialized it is, the less robust it is and the lower the threshold of stress or total collapse.

If you want to fight oppression and foster diversity, look for opportunities to establish or support people working as representatives and advocates. Sometimes you can even subvert a token into broadening their role in that direction. Network. Cooperate. Out-organize the opposition. It works. And when you hear "just a token" ... mention the alternatives and their advantages.

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