2020 has seen one of the biggest social movements of our generation. The death of George Floyd opened the eyes of millions of people across the world to how bad racism actually is, but whether actual change is taking place is a different matter.

From large businesses hollowly diversifying their work force, to individuals posting black boxes on social media, ‘tokenism’ has been seen all across the world and in many different forms.

A lot of people in the UK have been ignorant to the unfair treatment of Black people and how this is a part of our political systems. BLM may have changed this bias however most changes being made by businesses are for show and not because they actually want to reduce the discrimination.

Of course, some credit must be given that BLM may have genuinely woken up a lot of these CEO’s and executives to this discrimination and genuine change may be taking place. However, a reoccurring pattern between all businesses in the wake of the movement, is that the smaller businesses are very diverse and there is very little prejudice. Whereas the larger ones are so founded in the expectations for white, rich men to be in power that no change has been made.

A great example of this form of tokenism is Tesco’s decision to cut a black couple from one of their ‘Food Love Stories’ adverts. Around the same time, Sainsbury’s received a number of racist complaints over their ‘Gravy Song’ advert which featured a black family. The fact that Tesco did not stand by their decision shows that the advert was tokenism as it is clearly not a concrete value of Tesco.

All forms of social media often efficiently and publicly exposed these comments and acted as a form of education for those in the community still unaware of the prejudice experienced by Black people across the UK.

Social Media has acted as a hugely positive force for the movement however many individual social media users can be accused of tokenism.

Less than two weeks after the killing of George Floyd, ‘Black Out Tuesday’ was arranged. This aimed to send a message to businesses to make change happen. Unfortunately, the main result was young people posting black squares on social media because they felt pressured. This then made it more difficult to access educational information on the topic. 

Simply posting a black square is not enough. Spreading awareness, understanding the movement and educating others is what we should be doing to make real change.

Tokenism is a burden on the Black Lives Matter movement however, genuine change has been made as a result of the movement. Change in big and small businesses is taking place and individuals are changing their mindsets, there is still a long way to go but the movement has accelerated the change we desperately need.

Written by Isaac Lewis