Feeling Some Type of Way: Black Feeling and Emotional Ambiguity

Abstract

Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to police violence, medical racism, and workforce discrimination in comparison to their White counterparts. Controlling images that position Black people as emotionless criminals, over-emotional, and subjects who feel pain differently have been used to justify these racial disparities. This paper explores how Black Americans articulate complicated emotions produced by living in the United States as a citizen while American institutions are simultaneously organized around anti-Black racism. Black Americans have expanded their emotional vocabulary and developed feeling some type of way as a neo-emotion that abandons a search for accurate description by relying on emotional opacity and feelings that don’t register as feelings to refuse the terms that equate emotional knowability with one's access to humanity.