The Devil's Diary

Entry the Fourth

How Our Culture of Commodification of Emotional Labor Is Used to Negotiate Racism

The tenth of June, in the year 2026

Nach Golde drängt,
Am Golde hängt
Doch alles. Ach wir Armen! (Toward gold all presses, on gold all hangs. Ah, we poor souls!) Goethe, Faust, Part One¹

I keep this leaf for the cleverest bargain your age has struck, the purchase of peace from a wound. My trade has always been contracts, the soul exchanged for what the soul wanted anyway, and your century has improved upon me. You have learned to buy and sell the act of caring itself, and with that one market you have found a way to drive past the oldest wound you carry without ever stopping the carriage. The wound is the ranking of human beings by race. The road around it is paved with purchased feeling, and I collect the toll.

Begin with the wares. A scholar of your own gave the trade its name when she watched airline attendants being trained to smile, not to seem warm but to be warm, the feeling manufactured on schedule because the feeling was part of the fare.² She called it emotional labor, the management of one’s own heart for a wage. Note the precision. Not the work of serving, the work of feeling. The company does not buy the pouring of the coffee. It buys the calm in the hand that pours.

Now the word negotiate, which carries two souls in one body, as the best words do. A treaty is negotiated and ends. A hairpin turn is negotiated and remains. You do not resolve the mountain road. You get through it, and it waits for the next traveler exactly as sharp. Your culture negotiates racism in the second sense only. It has built a device for getting through the encounter, and the device would starve if the road were ever straightened.

Watch the device at street level. The worker behind the counter who is darker than the customer learns a particular performance, the deference that reassures, the patience that absorbs the slight, the smile that announces no offense was taken so that none need be admitted as given. One of your wisest described the doubled soul such work requires, the self that feels and the self that watches the feeling being measured through another’s eyes,³ and another described the mask worn so long it grafts to the face.⁴ The performance is purchased with the wage and demanded with the job. Hostility goes in, smoothness comes out, and the customer drives on through the turn having touched nothing. The calm is the product. The passage is what the calm purchases.

Climb from the counter to the boardroom and the same trade wears a better suit. After each public reckoning the institutions go shopping. They buy consultants, trainings, statements of solidarity composed by committee, a whole wardrobe of having-dealt-with-it, an industry now with conferences and salaries and very little to show in the ledgers of who is hired and who advances.⁵ And in the same building they take the unpaid version, the employee of the wronged race appointed by glances to explain the wound to everyone else, to sit on the panel, to absorb the questions, to model the gratitude. Your scholars have a name for that levy too.⁶ One transaction is metered and one is simply taken, and both convert a wound in the structure into a feeling that can be displayed, and a feeling displayed is a feeling discharged,⁷ and a feeling discharged leaves the structure precisely as it stood.

You will say the wronged can simply refuse the performance, and here I confess a professional admiration, for the market has eaten the refusal too. There is a price now for declining to explain, a speaking fee for the hard truth, an advance for the letter that says I am done educating you. I do not mock the truths, for many are true. I mark only the mechanism. The labor sells, and the refusal of the labor sells, and whichever you choose the till rings, because both leave the form of the bargain standing and merely move the price.⁸

Here is the clause I am proudest of, the one buried in the fine print. An old philosopher held that you are responsible even for what you never agreed to be responsible for, that obligation between souls is not a contract and cannot be invoiced.⁹ Your new arrangement inverts him exactly and sells the inversion as ethics. Care is metered now. Patience is billed. Understanding waits behind a toll, and the toll is praised as self-respect. I have spent a long career inverting commandments, and I have rarely seen one inverted so cleanly that the inversion is taught in seminars as the original.

And mark what the shape of the bargain does to the wound itself. Racism is a wound held in common, cut into laws and ledgers and neighborhoods, and a wound held in common can only be closed in common. A transaction is the opposite shape. Two parties, a price, a receipt, a closing. Every time the common wound is fed into the private bargain it comes out smaller than it is, a moment, a slight, a session, a fee, and the part of it that lives in the structure cannot pass through the till at all.¹⁰ The device is not failing to address the wound. The device is a machine for carrying the wound somewhere it cannot be addressed.

Your institutions have even revived an old rite of mine in subscription form. When the tension rises a victim is selected and ceremonially expelled, the old logo, the unenlightened policy of a decade past, the one official whose sin can stand for everyone’s, and the expulsion discharges the communal pressure while the community that generated the pressure walks home shriven.¹¹ The ancients at least had the honesty to call it sacrifice. You call it accountability and renew it annually.

Why do I prize this device above my older works? Because it feeds itself. The trade in managed racial feeling has careers now, a stake, a payroll. A dam does not want the river gone, for the dam is the river’s tenant. Every soul employed in metering the wound has acquired, whatever their heart intends, an interest in the wound’s continued flow, and intentions, as I can attest from long acquaintance with a certain well-paved road, are not the operative part.

One entry in this ledger I cannot bring to balance, and I record it because a false book is of no use even to me. Before the labor was priced it was extracted invisibly and called nature, the woman’s patience, the servant’s cheer, the porter’s good humor. Pricing it made the theft visible, and the visibility is real, and the women who first demanded wages for the work of caring were naming a robbery, not founding my market.¹² A true stone in the false chain. I note only what was built upon it. Visibility inside a market produces better-compensated extraction, not less of it, and the priced wrong outlives the invisible one, for it has acquired shareholders.

The exit is not hidden, which is why so few take it. Every toll booth depends on there being no free road beside it. Explain once without invoicing it. Extend a patience that was not purchased and keep no ledger of it. Understanding given freely does not diminish the giver, and that is the entire secret the price was set to conceal.¹³ One soul who gives it freely makes the booth beside them look like what it is. I am not worried. The road is wide and the booth is convenient and you are tired. But I am obliged by my office to record that the door was never locked.

Entry the fourth. What is priced will be provided forever, and what is provided forever need never be healed.