When I was a kid I noticed this sort of tokenizing happening in commercials, only I didn't know that there was a word for it (if 'tokenizing' had even been coined yet).

So I pointed it out cause I thought it was odd, and people thought I was being racist. I think that deep down, in my innocent mind of a child, I simply had an intuition that there was something dishonest and reductive about the way people of color were being used in the marketing industry. I just didn't know how to phrase that in a way that people could understand.

A lot of things I've said that have rubbed people the wrong way have been like that. Things that are based on an accurate intuition and simply communicated poorly, which then get lumped into the box with the ignorant and hateful people of the world. Probably because I grew up surrounded by those sorts of people, so my vocabulary reflected that until I started learning new ways to communicate. And even then people thought I was being disingenuous or mocking because the new vocabulary felt awkward on my tongue for a while.

Even now I put my foot in my mouth from time to time. I do tend to see things from a different perspective and people tend to be uncomfortable with anything but blindly conforming campism. But it's less about lack of vocabulary at this point at least.