Putdown With an Ugly Past

Rented blacks. Low blow. The slap D.C. Council member Marion Barry delivered when he charged that some African Americans among the contenders for Nats ownership were "blacks being rented for a day" hit hard.

The sting of it. The insult -- an insult familiar to many black folks, except that it usually comes from white folks, at least those types who are quick to suspect that tokenism is at play when a black person receives a high award or a major appointment, as if that person has little else of value to bring to the table.

It's heard in business. It's heard in education. It's heard in politics. It's the heart of the affirmative action debate, of the often false dichotomy pitting merit against race.

Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state who now is a Brookings Institution senior fellow, knows she's been called a token.

"The odds are the answer is yes, but not to my face," she says of the "small-minded people" who would think such a thing.

And Charles Ogletree, head of Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he's certain he's been viewed as a token through much of his life, dating to his days as a student body president of a white high school.

"Why'd you get that?" other students would ask suspiciously.

It's familiar to many African Americans, attuned as they are to historic white doubts about black people. And now Barry has voiced black doubts, a kind of opprobrium that carries all kinds of heavy historic baggage, cutting to the bone of questions of racial authenticity, racial loyalty.

"It's really designed to undercut the credibility of the person and denigrate the person's abilities, and when black people do that to other black people, it's particularly ugly," says Roger Wilkins, a George Mason University historian.

The African Americans involved in the bid for the Nationals baseball franchise include a former Cabinet secretary, a bank president and a broadcast executive.

Wilkins was the target of such an insult himself some 35 years ago. He worked for the Ford Foundation back then and was introduced to a neighborhood activist who, like him, was black. As he was attempting to explain who he was, the woman cut him off, saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, the one who sits by the door."

What she meant, Wilkins knew, was that "I was simply a door ornament and I had no authority, and not only that I had no authority but that I had no integrity, either, and let myself be used" by white people.