Abstract
No More Invisible Man is an engaging and compelling book. Through interviews with forty-two doctors, lawyers, engineers, and bankers, Adia Harvey Wingfield illuminates the experiences of black male professionals and makes critical contributions to our understandings of inequalities in the workplace. The title of her book is derived from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which describes how racism makes black Americans “invisible” to the larger white society that can see them only as stereotypes. Harvey Wingfield engages this idea of invisibility, using her data to support and challenge it.
According to Harvey Wingfield, black professional men continue to be “invisible” because both society and academics focus either on black men who failed out of the system or on elite black men such as Barack Obama. Thus, black men of the middle and/or professional classes remain unseen. Simultaneously, though, Harvey Wingfield describes how black professional men are made more visible by the processes of workplace tokenization, which highlight their difference from the normative white, male worker. Although tokenization is generally seen as negative, subjecting the “token” to excessive scrutiny and criticism, the effects for black professional men are more complex. Harvey Wingfield creates the term “partial tokenization” to describe how these men are both disadvantaged and privileged by tokenization. Black professional men are discriminated against, marginalized, and isolated. However, they also assert that they benefit from tokenization. For example, they describe being highly visible in the workplace as “Everybody remembers my name. Everybody knows who I am,” and that their successes and accomplishments are widely known (p. 45).
One of Harvey Wingfield’s strongest theoretical contributions is her documentation of the significance of black professional men’s relationships with colleagues and potential mentors. Her respondents describe these relationships as at least as important as technical skills in shaping their success (note: the same is likely true for white workers). It is key that these relationships are described as being founded on the common interests of the men: “sports, cars, and . . . women” (p. 33). Thus, it is black professional men’s masculinity that enables them to tap into networks that enhance, and potentially make, their careers. Consequently, gender clearly trumps race in determining who “fits” in these occupations.
Another significant theoretical contribution is Harvey Wingfield’s description of the diversity of black professional men’s responses to women in their male-dominated workplaces. As opposed to simply emphasizing the gender distinction that empowers these men (as theories predict), some black professional men identify with the struggles of women—particularly women of color—and work to support them. Others, however, draw upon dominant ideologies to argue that women are “by nature” more supportive of each other and create protective networks that black men as men are unlikely or unwilling to create. Thus, these men feel they need not help women because women can help themselves.
The reasons these men adopt the different approaches to women are multifaceted, and Harvey Wingfield argues they are likely shaped, too, by the gendered and racialized nature of occupations or organizations, and by the historical relationships between the minority groups involved. What is perhaps most theoretically significant about her research is that she demonstrates (again) how intersectionality cannot be interpreted simply as the product of numbers or of predetermined relationships of privilege and disadvantage. Instead, different occupations, organizations, times, and places offer distinct race/gender/class norms that interact in complex and often unexpected ways with workers’ identities and the relationships between groups of workers.
My one criticism is that I would have liked Harvey Wingfield to use more of her quotes and to reveal more about the exact patterns of her data. She does not often mention exactly how many of her respondents gave a specific answer, and while I certainly understand that qualitative research does not rise and fall on the numbers of respondents, I sometimes wanted to know exactly how all of her respondents “fell” across the different responses discussed.
On the whole, however, the book is superb. Harvey Wingfield’s writing is fantastic and a pleasure to read, though it is by no means lightweight. She walks the reader clearly and explicitly through the questions she brings to current theories, her comparisons between what theories predict and what her data reveal, and the theoretical and practical conclusions she draws. As a result, No More Invisible Man will interest many scholars and be a useful addition to many classes. Undergraduates will benefit from reading it in upper-division classes on race, gender, intersectionality, masculinities, and work and occupations. Similarly, it will be wonderful in graduate-level seminars. Clever graduate students will use the book in preparing for preliminary examinations, given Harvey Wingfield’s in-depth engagement of so many theoretical frameworks. No More Invisible Man is a successful addition to Harvey Wingfield’s legacy—and to intersectionality scholarship.