Black professional women report that they must transform themselves to be welcomed and accepted, especially in the workplace. They speak of performance weariness in verbal and nonverbal communicative interaction-exchanges with white colleagues. Many simply state that they feel they are in a 'parade', being judged for appearance, personal decorum, communication skills, and emotion management in addition to productivity. The objective of this article is to describe these women's experiences in line with promotion opportunities. For them, going to work involves a multilayered performance: (1) they must engage in racialized, gendered impression management at the generalized bureaucratic level; and (2) they rely on instructions grounded in race-based survival strategies to cope with challenges they face in unwelcoming work environments with concrete ceilings. Our analysis of these aspects of workplace behavior reveals that black women co-mingle etiquette and emotion management to gain acceptance and promotions, which strengthens race/ethnic group solidarity.

In this article, we demonstrate how the taken-for-granted, inner-workings of culture can become implicated in the (in)visibility of minority members. We seek to illuminate ways in which institutions may unwittingly facilitate (in)visibility through their organizational habitus. We begin by providing further evidence of invisibility and visibility as real and commonly experienced psychosocial phenomena among minorities within predominantly white, institutional settings. In particular, we argue that a minority's inconspicuousness can be simultaneously fused together with one's conspicuousness to form what we call racial=ethnic (in)visibility. This study employs focus-group data collected from a sample of administrators and faculty from elite K-12 independent (private) schools, an institution that admittedly has been slow to make cultural change in its racial=ethnic ideologies and practices.Since the ratification of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many American institutions (i.e., formal organizations, such as government bureaus, corporations, hospitals, and schools) have sought-either by A special debt is owed to Karl Alexander for reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript. We are also grateful for the invaluable research assistance of Shelly Brown,