In this article, I use in-depth interviews with black university men to investigate race, gender, and emotions. Participation in dominant institutions requires African American men to exhibit extraordinary emotional restraint. Because anger is culturally associated with men, however, black men’s suppression of anger violates masculine expectations. Thus, racial subordination not only creates difficult emotional expectations but may also create emotional dilemmas in which expected emotional displays undermine other identity expectations. In this article, I examine both how a group of black university men achieve emotional restraint and how they use their emotions to craft and manage their identities as black middle-class men. I argue that black men distance themselves from the controlling image of the angry black man by developing a shared identity I call moderate blackness. Moderate blackness entails emotional restraint, a moderate approach to campus racial politics, and the ability to get along with white people. These strategies work together to produce positive, restrained emotions and to manage anger and agitation, but they require black university men to “not see” racism. Black men use defensive othering to push the stereotype of the angry black onto black women. In doing so, they shore up their masculinity but leave women responsible for combating racial inequality.
