4. Its Tokenism!
(bonus points if they cant correctly define tokenism to support this argument) Right off the bat, tokenism is:
the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a smallnumber of people from under-represented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce from oxforddictionary.com
Applied to the media rather than the workforce, tokenism becomes more apparent when characters from racial or sexual minorities are used as secondary, minor characters or one-shot characters in order to look like the effort of being inclusive is being made. Their appearances may be quite bland to avoid stereotyping or made to seem exotic and special. Therefore, Uhura and Sulu in the original Star Trek series are not tokens, Serena Southerlyn (who infamously came out as a lesbian in the last minute of her last Law and Order episode) was an attempt at tokenism, and the Token Black Guy of Not Another Teen Movie is a humorous attempt on a serious issue in the media. Making the Doctor black isnt a token. It would be a token if, when he regenerated, Eleven tried on several different bodies (ala Romanas first regeneration) and one of them was a black guy. Perhaps the Doctor would then say something along the lines of This one feels good and equal to any other body, but maybe another day. It would be a token if he regenerated into a black dude but regenerated again an episode later, back to someone white. So yeah, making the main character of one of the most successful shows change race isnt tokenism. Its
overdue.