There is an unspoken, yet fiercely enforced, social contract in this country, and it’s one that black folks never signed. It’s the expectation, the outright demand, that we perform emotional labor for white society. This isn’t about holding a door open. This is about the systemic requirement to manage white feelings, to cushion white fragility, and to absolve white guilt, all while our own emotional reserves are running on fumes.

For a recent example, consider the death of prominent Christian nationalist figure Charlie Kirk, a man with a well-documented history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. His passing was not met with celebration, but with profound indifference. And this lack of caring, this refusal to offer the empathy Kirk himself famously denied to others, is what provokes pure fury in a segment of white society.

This rage was made terrifyingly clear when at least six HBCUs received credible threats and were forced into lockdown following Kirk's death, despite the FBI seeking a white male suspect. The issue is not that Black people are misunderstood; it is that we have dared to break an unspoken social contract. When we refuse to perform the requisite grief or offer expected platitudes, the reaction is not confusion, but outrage. How dare we not play our assigned part?

This is not a new phenomenon. It is as American as the plantation. It angers white society because it represents a fundamental breach of an unspoken social contract, one forged on the plantation and maintained through every subsequent era. This contract stipulates that Black people are responsible for the emotional and moral comfort of white America. Historically, this meant enslaved people performing contentment to sustain the myth of the "happy slave," a brutal performance designed to absolve the slaveholder’s conscience. The punishment for failing to perform this emotional labor, for showing anger, resentment, or even just authentic sadness, was brutal, often fatal. Your comfort was quite literally a matter of our life and death. 

Post-emancipation, the demand didn’t vanish; it evolved. It became the expectation of the “Magical Negro” trope in literature and film, the black character with no inner life of their own whose sole purpose is to guide a white protagonist to enlightenment. It became the pressure to be “the bigger person” in the face of blatant disrespect. It became the requirement to make white colleagues feel comfortable during discussions on race, to reassure them that they’re “one of the good ones,” to patiently explain concepts like systemic racism for the thousandth time as if it’s a novel theory and not the bedrock of our lived experience.

The demand for Black grief over a racist is the modern extension of this dynamic; it is a requirement for absolution. When Black people refuse to mourn, we refuse to perform the emotional labor that white society has come to expect as its due. This refusal shatters the narrative that our humanity is contingent on our capacity to forgive those who perpetuate our oppression, and in doing so, it withholds the moral validation the dominant culture feels entitled to receive.

Historians will tell you that the entire antebellum South was predicated on the emotional management of white people by the enslaved. Black people were forced to wear a mask of contentment, to sing while working, to show deference and gratitude to their captors, all to sustain the fiction of the “happy slave,” a narrative necessary to soothe the white conscience and maintain the social order. Historical references still matter because they reveal that the public demand for Black emotional labor is not accidental; it is systemic. This demand is a theft. It is the theft of our right to authentic emotion. We are granted a narrow band of acceptable feelings: we can be joyful athletes or entertainers, we can be stoic and long-suffering, we can be forgiving saints. But anger? Righteous indignation? A flat refusal to mourn an oppressor? That is met with sanctions. You see it in the think-pieces questioning our “grace.” You hear it in the dinner table conversations about how “divisive” we’re being. The message is clear: your grief is a public commodity. Your emotional energy is ours to consume.

This expected performance is not about genuine reconciliation; it is about comfort and a clean conscience. White society often seeks to engage with the art, legacy, or mythology of a problematic figure without being burdened by the full weight of their harmful beliefs. The willing participation of Black people in this ritual is the key ingredient. It provides a veneer of authenticity, signaling that if we can forgive, then they can comfortably enjoy the legacy without guilt. Our refusal to participate is therefore seen as an act of emotional sabotage. It denies them this easy path and forces an uncomfortable binary: you can either acknowledge the harm and its ongoing legacy, or you can celebrate the figure, but you cannot have both without our complicity.

Ultimately, the anger is a symptom of a disrupted power dynamic. For centuries, the control over Black emotion, from demanding smiles to demanding grief, has been a tool of social control. To dictate how we should feel is to assert dominance. Our authentic, unsanctioned indifference is thus interpreted not just as a personal rejection, but as a direct challenge to that authority. It is an assertion of emotional sovereignty that says our inner lives are not public property to be mined for someone else’s comfort or moral clearance. This declaration that we will no longer carry this specific labor forces white society to sit alone with the unresolved ugliness of its history and its present, without a guide, without a therapist, and without the forgiveness it did not earn. That is a profoundly unsettling, and for some, infuriating, solitude.

In a white dominated social ecology, the burden of emotional labor does not fall equally. White expectations, justified or not, assume Black people will bear the emotional front line so that white folks can stay emotionally safe and socially confident. The public arena compounds this: lectures, interviews, debates, and online exchanges where White audiences and commentators shape what counts as credible Black leadership, often privileging a calm, nonthreatening restraint over urgency, candor, and indignation that disrupts the status quo.

And let’s be explicitly clear about why the refusal to mourn a racist such as Charlie Kirk, is so fundamentally infuriating to the white psyche. It’s because our performative grief functions as their absolution. If we can forgive him, if we can say he was a product of his time, then they are let off the hook. It provides a clean narrative arc. It allows them to enjoy the art, the music, the legacy of a problematic figure without the moral stain. Our refusal to participate shatters that illusion. It forces an uncomfortable truth into the light: that some harms are irredeemable, and some histories cannot be washed clean with a few tears at a funeral. Our silence is a verdict. And they cannot stand it. And, WE. SIMPLY. DO. NOT. CARE!

So here is the blunt, unfiltered truth, straight from the school of a thousand hard knocks. Our emotional labor is not your entitlement. Our grief is not your get-out-of-jail-free card. Our forgiveness is not a transaction to purchase your comfort. The debt owed is centuries old, and it is owed to us, not by us.

It is exhausting to constantly be the teacher, the therapist, and the absolution priest for a nation that still refuses to properly acknowledge us and we are done. Be mad if you want to.