Adia Harvey Wingfield

Focuses on how working class black women use entrepreneurship as a route to upward mobility. By establishing business models that center explicitly on black women’s unique needs and social standpoints, they experience upward mobility and help other black women do the same. 

Describes the ways black professionals have to manage their emotions when working in predominantly white work spaces. This study finds that black men in particular censor any expressions of anger, while black women sometimes deploy anger strategically to be taken more seriously. This research also showed that for black professionals, diversity trainings are sometimes more of a source of emotional restraint than a site for meaningful dialogue. 

Examines black men’s unique workplace experiences when employed in white male-dominated professional jobs (as lawyers, doctors, engineers, or bankers). The book devotes particular attention to their relationships with women of all races, connections to black and white male colleagues, and the ways they carefully present themselves to avoid the specter of the “angry black man.”