ABSTRACT
This chapter considers emotional configurations that develop around the problem of racial diversity in institutional contexts, and the intentional fostering of unique sensitivities through the deployment of emotional protocols. While it is accepted that such sensitivities are morally and politically laudable and that such emotions are often the genuine response to real social conditions, it is proposed here that the summoning of such sensitivities on the institutional level often occurs within a set of managerial rationalities whose end result is the reproduction of those very racial attitudes and positions that they purport to challenge. One such configuration will be considered for the ways in which seemingly oppositional emotional styles achieve a sort of balancing act: rage, often expressed by people of color at conditions in institutional settings, and the posture of empathic listening, practiced by Whites in response to such displays of rage. This emotional ensemble often attains a certain functional equilibrium, a delicate stability in which racialized positions are reproduced and managed, even as they are ostensibly being challenged. Toward this end, this chapter discusses the history of these two emotional figures, the raging Black and the listening White, through a short archaeology of the psychologization of racial emotion.
