The Burden of Healing Communities, Supporting Families and Navigating Systemic Racism Often Falls on Those Receiving the Least Support
In 1983, American sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in her groundbreaking book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Initially defined as “displaying certain emotions to meet the requirements of a job”, the term has been applied to additional contexts such as families and broader communities.
The Burden Placed on Black Women
Marriage and Family Therapist Candace Jones, in her 2025 article for the Clinicians of Color website, writes, “emotional labor is often required for service-centered jobs, caregiving, and other client-facing positions but the added labor experienced by black women is much higher. It requires that the laborer constrains and dismisses their feelings for the comfort of others. Black women unwillingly enter these agreements to avoid being the center of unwanted attention.When Black women experience this kind of hyper-visibility and invisibility simultaneously, it can lead to stress with eventual physical and mental health implications.”
Emotional labor as a term has re-emerged in recent years surrounding discourse around boundaries and realistic expectations for the workplace. But there is no doubt the exhaustion of high emotional labor has also spilled into interpersonal relationships within the Black community. Oftentimes, as Black people, there is the expectation of holding collective trauma. But what is often underestimated is the ongoing impact this can have on one’s mental and emotional state.
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Collective Trauma Lives On
According to a 2023 Healthline article, “How We Can Transform and Heal Trauma in Black Communities”, “Black communities have been experiencing collective trauma for centuries, trauma that stems from a long history of enslavement and abuse in the United States. But this trauma isn’t just a past event ― it links to pervasive structural, systemic, and institutional racism, which has a significant impact on the lived experiences of Black people in the U.S. today…” The article continues to state that one of the things that can be done to process collective trauma is community input.
How effective has community input been in helping to process collective trauma? How often is emotional labor within the Black community expected to hold space for those struggling without any guarantee of emotional replenishment? This is not to say that the work of organizations such as the NAACP, SNCC, the Black Panthers, and more, have not done anything to lay the groundwork for processing collective trauma.
Moreover, one of the unintentional legacies of these movements and the ongoing racial trauma many African Americans experience today- especially in the age of social media and artificial intelligence – is the expectation of Black women, men, LGBTQ+ members, etc. to do the emotional labor for a country that still refuses to acknowledge them as full and equal human beings.
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