Abstract
No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work fills a major gap in the literature by making visible the experiences of the approximately 25 percent of black men who are employed in professional/managerial jobs in the United States (p. 3). Media and scholarly attention has traditionally focused on two common cultural depictions of black masculinity: the urban underclass or the highly educated black elite. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-two black men—thirteen lawyers, twelve doctors, ten engineers, seven bankers—and four white male professionals, this book moves us beyond stereotypical “controlling images” of black men by expanding our understanding of the construction of marginalized masculinities among an understudied group. This is a “must read” for scholars and students interested in marginalized masculinities, workplace inequality, and intersectionality.
Wingfield introduces the concept of “partial tokenization” to explain how black men professionals face challenges and barriers due to their racial status in white dominated occupations, but sometimes benefit from the patriarchal dividend as men in male-dominated fields. She skillfully reassesses Kanter’s theory of tokenism by joining it with the literature on gendered organizations to account for the intersections of race, gender, and class. The book provides vivid examples of the complex ways that men are both disadvantaged and privileged in white, male-dominated professional occupations.
Using this updated frame, the findings chapters examine Kanter’s three consequences of token status—visibility, contrast, and assimilation. Chapter 2 highlights the “visibility” that black professional men experience including heightened scrutiny of their dress, comportment, and work skills, but also some advantages including “higher salaries, professional recognition, and an increased customer base” and positive acknowledgment from black customers and clients (p. 50). Chapters 3 and 4 explore “contrast”—whether the dominant group attempts to distinguish itself from token groups and how that impacts the relationships between token groups—by exploring black professional men’s relationships with women and with other men at work. Some men empathize with women’s disadvantage in male-dominated occupations and attempt to find ways to support them. Other men view women as gaining unfair advantages because of their visibility, especially black women, which reinforces Kanter’s original hypothesis that tension will exist between token groups. Some black men discuss the importance of keeping their distance from white women, a form of “self-quarantine,” that protects them from the consequences of the historically stereotypical assumptions that black men pose a violent, sexualized threat to “pure white” women. Surprisingly, white men did not exaggerate their differences from black men. Instead, distinction was manifested at a structural level where white men had greater access than black men to powerful networks of professional colleagues. On the other hand, the respondents describe having access to at least some powerful white men mentors in male-dominated workplaces. Black men’s relationships with other (same class) black men are characterized by solidarity and a sense of shared understandings regarding the challenges of being a minority in a white-dominated setting. Chapter 5 focuses on “assimilation” or the impact of stereotypical assumptions regarding the informal roles black men “should” take on in the workplace. Wingfield identifies the existence of “the super brother,” the “imposter,” and the “race representative” and introduces core forms of marginalized masculinity that black men create in response to these stereotypical roles. This chapter is a major contribution to the literature and will be highly cited by masculinity scholars. Chapter 6 focuses on the emotional labor required of black men as they negotiate the “angry, violent black man” stereotype. Some men described being able to express anger while others stayed “unemotional.” The acceptance of masculine aggression and conflict in male-dominated contexts may have allowed for black men to feel more leeway to express anger than has been found in other contexts. The book concludes that affirmative action will not address the problems black professional men face, but does not provide specific guidance for what will.
No More Invisible Man is a book I have been waiting for. It places black professional men front and center using a powerful combination of Kanter’s theory of tokenism, intersectionality, and gendered organizations. Wingfield brings the matrix of domination to life by showing us “how inequality affects men when they experience simultaneous privilege and disadvantage” (p. 3). The call for the use of “partial tokenization” to analyze workers in other contexts—black women in white female dominated fields (such as teaching), for example—will be fruitful, but we must be careful not to slip back into a traditional use of tokenism that focuses on numbers to the exclusion of an analysis of gender, race, class as systems of power. If the broader focus on the asymmetrical valuation of masculinity in our culture drops out of the analysis, we may miss the intersections of race, class, and gender that Wingfield insists are essential. Wingfield calls for further research on how cross-racial and cross-gender interactions occur in various occupational contexts. Like this book, such research will allow us to better understand “alliance politics” at work and will be an important step toward dismantling “inequality regimes” within organizations.