Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, Felt Criminality, and Emotional Epistemology

Abstract

The opacity and mundaneness of racism often allows it to slip through our traditional systems of accounting and measuring. The study of racialized emotions has been an important intervention in sociology to understand the intimate nature of racialized social structures. There still is a need to understand the language Black communities use to communicate their complex emotional worlds and the nuanced ways abusive power systems are felt in everyday life. Using 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in northeast North Carolina and data from 23 in-depth interviews, the author examines the relationship between Black people’s emotional habitus and racial structures. The results indicate that Black people developed vibe as a rhetorical tool to articulate their complex emotional economy and it is regularly used to make sense of racialize experiences. Vibe is not limited to racial understanding as it works to name the often unsayable and perceptive ways people know, feel, and respond to the opacity and non-quantifiable dimensions of social experience. This paper focuses on the ways Black community members used vibe to articulate feeling the criminalization of Blackness or what this research refers to as ‘felt criminality.’ Despite facing emotional subjugation Black community members were still invested in emotive projects and used their felt experience as an epistemological resource to make sense of racial processes in a supposedly colorblind society.