Being a historian requires me to constantly examine whose version of events we have chosen to tell. Who is doing the telling, and why? In the classic narrative of women leaving the kitchen for the workforce only to return home to a “second shift,” the protagonist is presumed white, middle class, and married. But for many black women, there was no choice to leave the kitchen because they were employed as paid domestics or as wage earners their families relied upon. Then went home to their own kitchen. Rinse and repeat.
By 1970, black feminists coined the term “double jeopardy” to identify discrimination based upon racial and gender identity, subsequently adding a third element of economic status to create the term “triple jeopardy.” In the black community, the code around composure, tone, and dress was understood to convey judgment upon all black Americans. One managed oneself to manage another person’s perception. Think about it: that’s a lot of heavy lifting. That’s what emotional labor means: when you manage yourself and shape how someone feels about you, and whether or not you feel valued in return.
Being the owner of a personal services business in Los Angeles requires me to listen to my colleagues—the women of color in our professional organizing industry about how they experience our similar work lives. My discussion with women of color really moved me and opened my eyes. I have been studying and teaching about women’s history for years, most recently through the lens of emotional labor. And here was an entire layer that has been missing: emotional labor and race.
Contemporary journalist Reniqua Allen, writing in the Washington Post in 2018, underscored this dynamic in her essay, “It’s Not Just White Women: The ‘Mental Load’ Is Real for Women of Color Too.” Allen explores how women of color often face a triple burden: managing traditional household emotional labor, taking on cultural translation or mediation roles (especially in immigrant families), and navigating the emotional toll of racism in both personal and professional spheres.
I remarked on this triple burden at a talk recently. In a packed room of women of color, nodding heads all around, and shouts of “tell it!” resonated.
Emotional labor in households of color often extends beyond the nuclear family. Intergenerational caregiving is not uncommon. Taking responsibility for community affairs is another way the mental load of emotional labor extends far beyond the home. And always, families of color manage the emotional work of navigating systemic racism. In a recent interview with members of Ebony and Orderly, Professional Organizers of Color member Carolyn Rogers notes:
As women, we tend to take on the happiness of our family meaning dealing with and trying to shape the emotions of our spouse, our partner, our kids, to be sure everybody is happy in the house. So that means I have to know what’s going on with them. What do they have to deal with that comes from out in the world including dealing with social issues, dealing with racial issues, dealing with how people feel about what’s going on in politics, dealing with all of that. For example, my nephew lives with us. In addition to teaching him how to maneuver around the house I also pay attention to how he maneuvers in the world and how he handles things that come his way. So as women of color we are always asking the question did this bad thing happen to me because this person was just an a***hole in general or it only happened to me because I’m a brown person. There is an additional aspect when you put race into the picture in addition to the regular everyday stuff.
Professional Organizer Robyn Reynolds says: “Picture this. I arrive early to a mostly affluent neighborhood just to be sure I am on time and haven’t gotten lost, plus I like to be early! So, here I am, a Black woman sitting in her car for sometimes up to 20 minutes. While I know that I have a reason to be there, others may not. So far, I have not had the cops called on me but it is something I think about often. Will today be the day? Then, the time has come for me to ring the bell and meet my client for the first time. Unless they have looked at my website, they do not know that I am a person of color. For some it is surprising, for others it doesn’t matter. The point is that I never know whether or not they care.”
Arlie Hochschild, the originator of the term ‘emotional labor’ extends the concept of emotional management to racial reconciliation, noting that:
“…a Black person may be treated as a ‘representative’ of all black people…Or in other ways, people of color and really minorities of every sort, face the task of peeling off other people’s projections onto them…Any member of a minority, whether based on gender, sexuality, religion, disability…is tacitly given the extra emotional task of helping others relate to oneself in a relaxed and accepting way.”
Dr. Belinda Tucker, UCLA Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, notes that she and her husband worked hard to create together an environment at home where he was able to express feelings related to the systemic racism rampant in his workplace. “We uplift and elevate masculinity because it’s so brought down by the man outside. Back in the day when I did my graduate research, the comment ‘Well, I want to uplift and elevate my husband so that he feels like a man,’ might have elicited from me a white-privileged response like “Get counseling.” But now I get it. Racism still reigns in this country, so a black woman saying the same thing, I think, “Oh, okay,” because I understand the context is so different.
Emotional Labor Essential Reads
There is a cost to carrying the weight of emotional labor. Referred to as the “superwoman schema” – many among us feel compelled to demonstrate unwavering competence. We suppress our feelings. We don’t like feeling vulnerable and we tend to go beyond the mark, over and above, accomplishing feats amid limitation. We deny self-care in our ongoing care for others. Exhausted and depressed, women “crash out,” a term used in a 2025 article by Miriam Musa in Rolling Out, a digital magazine for people of color, phenomena for women of color shouldering complex emotional labor differs from typical burnout. A 2025 article by Miriam Musa in Rolling Out, a digital magazine for people of color, notes that “The crash out trend has highlighted how much unpaid emotional and domestic labor black women perform in their families, workplaces and communities. This invisible work includes managing household logistics, supporting colleagues, mentoring younger people, and maintaining family relationships. It represents significant economic value that goes unrecognized… the ripple effects show just how much others depend upon their unacknowledged contributions.”
For these reasons, when creating the revised 2nd Edition of Emotional Labor, Judith Kolberg and I sought to document the experience of woman of color. Emotional labor transcends housewife problems and cannot be solved with better chore charts alone. Emotional labor has just as much to do with racism and socioeconomic status as it does femininity. Recognizing emotional labor means addressing its source, thereby enabling individuals to distribute it equitably among household members and partners.
