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Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director.
As Prescod grew older, she began to understand that she was molding herself to fit in a world of white supremacy. She had to be perfect — better than anyone else. That led to undergoing painful hair straightening in elementary school and developing an eating disorder when she hit puberty.
The murder of George Floyd was a turning point for Prescod, who is now 34. Following Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, she posted a searing Instagram video that went viral in which she laid out the many ways that white colleagues and media figures had marginalized and ignored her and other African Americans all while claiming to be anti-racist allies.
Prescod has a new memoir, “Token Black Girl.” She has a newly formed consulting agency 2BG (2 Black Girls), which advises fashion and beauty brands and influencers on anti-racism.
Prescod writes: “The Token Black Girl is characterized mostly by her proximity to her white peers and her nonthreatening and friendly nature. She is nonthreatening because she is almost never the romantic interest, and her primary function is to provide ‘attitude’ and ‘sass,’ either as humor or as an attempt to elevate the sex appeal of the otherwise all-white entity. She is a good student because she has to be. She actually feels like she has to be good at everything. She’s almost always a good dancer, and even if she’s not, it doesn’t matter because everyone will still think she’s a good dancer. She either has or can get the requisite social signifiers of acceptance—everything except white skin, of course. She will be well spoken, well dressed, and well groomed. She likes all the things her friends like, including boys, but they will not like her. She almost never acknowledges her position as the sole Black member of a group because talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. She can never make white people uncomfortable. Her most critical responsibility is providing protection against the ‘racist’ label that might otherwise be hurled at a gaggle of white women devoid of ethnic variety.”
“When you are a person of color in these environments, you go into survival mode because you’re very convinced that … it’s assimilate or die,” Prescod told The Vermont Conversation. “You are not developing into a whole individual because you’re so defensive. You’re like a caged feral animal. … I don’t want kids living like that. It’s very stressful.”