Let’s Chat: Emotional Labor

Hey y'all Ashantis here I am coming at you with this new IGTV series I'm calling it Let's Chat and the point of the series is to be educational but also have a bit of a therapeutic lens as we look at a lot of the really important terms and ways of thinking that are coming out right now but might be a little bit confusing and maybe you just don't know where they come from so a term that has been sitting on my heart to talk about has been emotional labor I think it's really important that we're

having the conversation about what emotional labor is right now but I think it can be a little bit confusing to understand if it's a new term and I was also interested to see where it came from so I did a little research and I am gonna just gone through what I found in some of the ways that I have even experienced people asking me for emotional labor without them probably knowing they were doing it within the last week or so the term emotional labor was coined by a sociologist her name was Arlie Hochschild and think

I'm pronouncing that correctly and it first came up in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling and I went ahead and linked that book I found I believe it's a full PDF of it so if you want to go ahead and use that as a resource and your learning going forward you do that so bear with me because this this definition is deep so she describes emotional labor as one that requires you to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind and others

the kind of labor that calls for coordination of mind and feeling and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor is deep and integral to our individuality obviously that is a mouthful so we get to 2020 the way that I personally describe emotional labor is it's the act of putting up with someone else's bullshit in order to keep them comfortable and there are a lot of examples of this like when you have a really really rude customer and you as a waiter just continue to put on a smile not say anything or

when y'all hop into the DM's of your favorite bloggers and you're just like hey girl give me this link without being like hi you are a person also thank you for giving me the service like yes and both of those scenarios what you in some way are providing them with success right if you are the customer you're providing the waiter with the tip and that's their livelihood if you are the consumer kind of coming from the influencer side of things by you using that link they might be getting a commission but the reality is the

way that you interact with people has an impact so you have to keep that in mind so to take it out of the work setting I would say that emotional labor most consistently takes place with and you ask a member of a marginalized group to explain one of the many injustices that they have experienced because you are not a part of that group and so that can look like explaining microaggressions or even yourself you are micro aggressing that person and then them taking the step back to be like hey here's why that's a problem and

if you aren't familiar with the term microaggressions I have linked two wonderful folks that have already done videos on this so if you're not familiar with that term you can go and check them out but you know in our current climate every time you ask a black person to relive trauma for the benefit of your education benefit you're asking them to provide you with emotional labor and I thought this journal called impossible Burdens: White Institutions, Emotional Labor, and Micro-Resistance did a pretty good job of summarizing what that can look like so it says people of

color within white institutional spaces carry the burden of having to choose between tactfully participating in their own objectification and marginalization within the institution or actively reacting against these racial dynamics at the risk of institutional alienation and possibly exclusion whether we're talking about an institution like higher education or we're talking about the institution that is life this is straight fricking facts like if somebody has been upset with something that you've said to them right they feel as though ever you have said or done to them was done in in poor taste whatever that poor taste was

right racism sexism etc like if we choose not to say anything in some ways we're continuing to live into the oppression but if we do then A. we are providing with the emotional labor of explaining it but B. we are we are possibly gonna be told you're you're overthinking it, like it really wasn't like that you're making too big of a deal out of it and then people see you as like the angry marginalized person so that's great and you know in this last week I have sat through multiple conversations with white people that are

processing their newfound understanding of racism and other social injustices in America and it's it's exhausting okay and and that is a form of emotional labor because while I don't believe it was the intention of anybody that I've spoken to about these things for them to be like oh let me tell you all the information that I have learned in the last X amount of time when they say things like it's shocking it's revealing like all that's doing is reminding us that this has always been a problem but we're just now actually paying attention to it

and in some ways it's kind of like a slap in the face like this has been an issue especially even in the medias like in the last eight or so years y'all just kept ignoring us every time we said hey this is a problem so now when you're like oh my god I understand how are you feeling but like it's a lot to take in and when you're just like processing all of that with Black people that is emotional labor and in some ways probably traumatizing to a degree so like this is a moment to

write that down don't do that you know a different example besides just talking with people is when people ask you for your work right so I had somebody who wanted to they wanted to feature me on their page as a part of #AmplifyMelanatedVoices I appreciate that and when they asked me if I was okay with being featured which I also appreciate because some people aren't they said can you write up your story so that I can post it well the reality is this when you're asking you to write up my story for the purpose of

being shared on your page and the point of you sharing me is to amplify my voice me writing up my story is not only literal labor right I have to do it but be it's emotional labor because it's like you tell my followers why they should follow you like if you really want to amplify my voice you just come up with that story yourself why do you follow me right that's that's the voice that your followers want to hear that they're there for you so if you're choosing is your platform in that way don't rely

on the people you want to raise up to tell you how to do it like you've got to do the work too so you know I want to keep in mind a couple of things as we start to end this video because that was probably a lot of information in a short amount of time and you probably have a lot of processing to do but moving forward understand that mistakes will continuously be made but what you have to remember is that you're in the middle of history right now right like the things that we are

talking about the strides that we have made in the last week and a half those are all things that are possibly gonna be in our history books and so you have to take each day at a time in order for you to consistently learn but remember to shift your action as you're learning because your your action is your doing that's that's a way you're thinking that's the way your being in this world and all of those things are gonna matter in this fight in this revolution so I hope that you've you've learned something from today's

lesson and I hope that you've also learned that it's important to call in right if you're a white person or a non black person of color it's important to call in other people in that group what you should not be doing is in this same process of learning is calling out Black people some of them they might be wrong but the reality is this when you're like why aren't you posting on social media like you're not down for the cause you're causing me the emotional labor to have to tell you I am the cause cause

I look like this like every time I step outside of my house I am Brown like I am Black like I can't I can't change that so I am the cause and I don't need to explain it to people because I am it so it's just something that I want y'all to keep in mind because while this is new to many of you this shit started in 1916 so you gotta try again with that but I really do hope that this was informative I know there are some other wonderful ladies that are doing educational sort

of video series like these so I have tagged them below two of them did the microaggressions video I chatted about earlier and I will also link the journal that I mentioned and I hope this was informative for you if you have questions go ahead and leave those below if you have topics that you think would be cool to be covered in this way leave those below you know have conversations with each other because really unless we're we're getting into the nitty-gritty of it we're not going to be able to continue to have change and it's

really important so I'll see you back maybe next week I'll try to do these weekly we'll see