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.

The First Time I Heard: Black Feminist Approaches to Hip Hop Methodologies

“…Rather, as Miles contends, Hip Hop videography enables vernacular possibilities; it provides new ways to hear and know the sounds of local communities. In some of his related work, Miles (2022b) offers an additional framework to understand these moments. Through the framework termed the vibe , Miles theorizes the use of affective registers to learn, interpret, and make sense of racial processes and social locations.…”

“…This sort of claim asserts that many of the everyday moments and conversations that we have with one another have very real political implications. As Miles (2022b) also says, “All Black people are theorists.”…”

Neo-emotions: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

“…Classic methods in cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology that identify emic perspectives could help identify the perceptions, experiences, and emotional vocabularies of groups and communities that develop neo-emotions. These methods include ethnography (Holyfield, 1999;Lutz, 1998;Miles, 2023), interviewing members of subcultures (Lois, 2001), content analysis of cultural products (Altheide, 1987;Recuber, 2016), and using diary methods to elicit rich reflections on the variability of emotional experiences and expressions Kenten, 2010). Such methods can allow for open-ended exploration of the words, meanings, uses, and contexts that inform neo-emotions.…”

“…The drive to find basic and universal emotions has rendered emotion practices that defy, blend, or operate outside of a fixed taxonomy illegible. Privileging the diverse emotional vocabularies of groups and subcultures promises to move us beyond a fixed taxonomy mindset (Miles, 2023). Jackson et al (2019) point to language as a useful site for bettering our understanding of cultural variability in emotional experiences.…”