Word: token
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That question would be explosive if the contender were a safe token, a man who had held all the right offices, adopted all the sensible positions, and differed from the majority's norms only by the accident of his race. But this contender challenges all the established verities at once. For Jackson, the illegitimate son of a teenage mother, is a fiery preacher who rose to national prominence through controversy and tumult, and he now heads a left-wing populist movement that confronts the centrist assumptions of political life...
This he resisted, except in token ways, as when he asserted his desire to be the "education President," a nice phrase that remains a flesh-free bone in his skeletal rhetoric. To go much further would be to flaunt the reality that, unlike Reagan, Bush at heart is a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, a manager rather than an innovator. In retrospect, Bush's caution was just right for the orthodox Republican primary electorate in most states, and particularly in the South, where Reagan's popularity rating in the party remains above 80%. But presidential campaigns are about change...
...last month, for instance, Jorge Antonio Restrepo Monslave, 29, a shop assistant with no known drug connections, was shot in the head outside his home by two attackers who took nothing from him. His murder was one of a dozen that day, none of which received more than a token investigation by police...
Today's black business class contributes generously to antiapartheid organizations, and many militants now accept it as the protagonist in a new form of confrontation with whites that is taking place in the boardroom. "At one time black managers in South Africa were little more than token blacks in white business," says Morakile Shuenyane, a spokesman for the independent Black Management Forum. "Now it is the responsibility of black management to play a role model with the intention of melting white attitudes." Far from serving as quislings for the white establishment, the new black elite is emerging...
According to the study, a number of schools seem to be less in the business of education than that of processing federal loan money. Some were found to recruit students from unemployment and welfare offices, waive them through token entrance exams and then sign them up for courses whose costs often just happen to equal the maximum available federally guaranteed loans. In many cases, the study found, students do not even realize they are signing loan applications. Trade schools were also found to lie to students about their job-placement rates and make false claims about the qualifications of their...