ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study on feeling rules through semistructured interviews with 25 African American professionals employed in a variety of occupations. It argues that feeling rules are implicitly racialized within professional workplaces, imposing additional restrictions on the emotional performances from black employees with deleterious consequences for their professional lives. Respondents note that their workplaces expect employees to follow feeling rules when it comes to display of several key emotions: expressing pleasantness, displaying anger and irritation, and revealing fears and concerns related to race. Respondents experience feeling rules as racialized concepts in two different but related ways. They argued that the racial dynamics of the workplace make it more difficult to adhere to the feeling rules that are equally applied to workers of all races, and perceived that the black workers are held to different emotional standards than their white colleagues.
