Code-Switching at Work: Why Racialized Performance and the Pressure to Belong Are So Exhausting

Your boss is talking during a team meeting about how employees should handle difficult customers, and he says everyone needs to smile, remain pleasant, and keep the customer happy even when the customer becomes rude or aggressive. You immediately think about what happened to your coworker last week, when a customer started yelling at her over something she could not control and everyone expected her to shake it off and finish her shift. You disagree with the policy, and you are getting ready to say that professionalism should leave room for employees to protect themselves when someone is treating them badly, when another thought enters the conversation inside your head: How is he going to hear this coming from me?

You have worked with your boss long enough to know that he likes employees who are agreeable, and you have spent enough of your life watching confidence become “attitude,” directness become “aggression,” and a serious expression become “unfriendly” when the person being described is Black. You start running through the sentence before you say it, trying to figure out how much disagreement the room can tolerate from you and whether your boss is going to hear the point or become more focused on how you made it. By the time you speak, your voice is softer, your expression is warmer, and the sentence has changed from what you originally wanted to say. “I completely understand wanting customers to feel welcome. I wonder if there could also be some flexibility when somebody becomes aggressive with staff.”

The meeting continues, your boss nods, another coworker adds something, and the conversation moves on, which means the calculation worked. You got enough of your point into the room for it to be heard, and you delivered it in a way that helped your boss continue experiencing you as calm, professional, reasonable, and easy to work with. You are still irritated when the meeting ends because you know how much work happened inside you before one fairly ordinary opinion was allowed to leave your mouth.

Later that afternoon, another kind of calculation begins when somebody sends out the calendar for an important company event and you notice that it falls on Yom Kippur. Maybe you are observant and already know you will not attend, maybe your Jewish practice is more cultural and this is one of the few days each year that carries deep religious meaning for you, or maybe you are deciding how much of your Jewish identity you want the people around you to know at all. Asking for the day off now means deciding how much you need to explain, whether “religious holiday” will be enough, whether your boss will see the request as inconvenient, and whether the conversation will become another moment where you are responsible for educating people while trying to complete the job you were hired to do.

I am writing about these experiences through the two communities I belong to, Black and Jewish, because those are the histories I can speak about from inside my own life. The histories are different, the racial positions are different, and the way Black and Jewish people have been treated within American society has changed in different ways over time. What connects them in this article is the developmental experience of learning that belonging in a larger culture can require close attention to how other people perceive you, what parts of yourself feel safe to reveal, what needs to be controlled, and how much evidence you may feel responsible for providing that you deserve to be in the room.

What Is Code-Switching at Work?

Code-switching at work can involve changing speech, vocabulary, tone, facial expression, clothing, hair, emotional expression, cultural references, humor, body language, political disclosure, religious visibility, and how directly you communicate with people who hold more power than you. Some of those adjustments are deliberate and strategic because every person changes aspects of how they communicate depending on context. You may speak differently with your best friend than you do with your boss because you understand the relationship, the purpose of the conversation, and what you want to accomplish.

The experience becomes more complicated when code-switching at work is connected to the possibility of being stereotyped, excluded, professionally penalized, or treated as though your behavior says something larger about the group you belong to. Research by Courtney McCluney(opens in new tab) and colleagues found that Black employees who changed aspects of their speech, hairstyle, or name presentation to align more closely with White professional norms were consistently perceived as more professional than Black employees who did not code-switch. That finding matters because the person making the adjustment is receiving real feedback from the environment about which versions of self-presentation are rewarded. 

This is why I do not think the useful clinical question is whether code-switching is good or bad. A Black employee may soften the way she communicates because she has repeatedly watched Black women’s directness interpreted differently, and a Jewish employee may decide not to mention being Jewish after hearing enough comments in the office to know that disclosure will change the social environment around her. Both people are reading information that exists in the room, and the adaptation may protect employment, credibility, opportunity, social ease, or simply the amount of conflict they will have to manage that day.

When belonging has consequences, presentation becomes protection.

Why Do People Code-Switch at Work?

Human beings are constantly learning how relationships and environments work. We notice who has power, which behaviors receive warmth, what creates tension, what makes another person withdraw, what earns praise, and which mistakes seem to disappear quickly while others continue following someone long after the original moment has passed. Through repetition, the brain and nervous system become increasingly efficient at recognizing those patterns, which is one reason a response that once required conscious thought can eventually happen before you have finished deciding what you think.

At Centering Healing, this is how I understand the attachment template. Children develop expectations about themselves, other people, safety, connection, protection, and belonging through thousands of interactions with the people around them, and those expectations begin organizing how they respond when similar relational conditions appear later in life. A child who repeatedly learns that disagreement creates distance may begin scanning authority figures closely, while a child whose achievement consistently brings warmth may begin experiencing competence as one of the most reliable ways to keep connection steady. My broader developmental framework understands these patterns as adaptations that emerge through repeated experience rather than isolated personality traits. 

Culture enters the same developmental system because parents are also teaching children how the world outside the family responds to them. A Black parent may tell her daughter that she has to work twice as hard because the parent has already encountered racism in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces and wants the child to be prepared before somebody else teaches her that lesson more painfully. A Jewish parent may emphasize education, financial stability, discretion, family continuity, or awareness of antisemitism because previous generations learned that social acceptance and security could change quickly. Children receive these lessons from people they depend on to help them interpret the world, so cultural survival knowledge can become intertwined with attachment expectations long before the child has words for the difference between the two.

This is one reason why people code-switch at work even when nobody has directly instructed them to do it. The person may be responding to what the current workplace has actually demonstrated, to what previous workplaces have taught, to what family members warned them about, and to an attachment template that already became skilled at monitoring powerful people. Once those sources of information begin reinforcing each other, code-switching can feel less like a decision and more like the way you naturally move through a room.

If you want to go deeper into how the attachment template develops and continues shaping adult relationships, I have written more about that process in Your Attachment Template: The Map Your Body Built to Survive(opens in new tab).

Why Do Black Employees Feel Pressure to Be “Twice as Good”?

For many Black children, the pressure to perform starts long before the first professional job. A parent may look at a B and remind the child that she is going to have to work harder than the White children around her, or explain before an interview that she needs to speak clearly, sit up straight, be respectful, make eye contact, and make sure there is no reason for somebody to underestimate her. Those messages can contain ambition and love while also carrying the parent’s knowledge that the larger culture may apply standards unevenly.

Current research on Black racial socialization describes “twice as good” as a common message within preparation-for-bias conversations, where parents try to prepare children for racism and unequal opportunity. A 2025 study of Black parent-teen dyads specifically discusses the familiar expectation that Black young people may need to be twice as good as White peers to receive the same opportunities, while also examining how families transmit racial knowledge through direct and indirect experiences. 

This is also where Dr. Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome framework becomes useful to me. DeGruy describes a theory of multigenerational trauma, continued oppression, and adaptive survival behaviors that developed within African American communities under slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racism. Her work gives us a way to think about how strategies formed under conditions of oppression can continue traveling through families, including through what children are taught about achievement, danger, other Black people, White authority, and what they will need to survive or advance. 

In my own family, that history does not feel particularly distant because my grandfather lived on a plantation. When family history sits that close, phrases about rising above, doing better, taking advantage of opportunities, refusing to embarrass the family, and proving people wrong can carry more than ordinary achievement pressure. The child can begin experiencing success as something personal and communal at the same time, which means a mistake may feel larger than a mistake because it seems connected to what your family endured and what you believe you now have to prove.

That is also how the painful sentence I am not like those Black people can begin making psychological sense. Racist stereotypes create stigmatized images of Blackness, and distance from those images can begin to feel protective if you have spent years being taught that the dominant culture is already waiting for a reason to place you inside one of them. The person can love Black people, feel deeply connected to Black culture, and still become uncomfortable when another Black person’s behavior moves closer to something she was taught would jeopardize acceptance because her own belonging has been organized around showing that she is different from what the stereotype predicts.

Jewish Identity at Work and the Pressure to Manage Visibility

Jewish identity at work can create a different form of calculation because Jewish visibility itself can shift depending on names, religious practice, clothing, political conversations, geography, and whether other people know someone is Jewish. An employee can move through months of work being perceived simply as White and then experience the room differently once she asks for Rosh Hashanah off, wears a Star of David, talks about family in Israel, or corrects an antisemitic comment. The identity did not suddenly appear, but the social meaning of the identity changed once other people became aware of it.

This becomes particularly complicated in the United States because many Jews of European descent gained increasing access to the social privileges of whiteness over the twentieth century while family histories of persecution remained very close. Anthropologist Karen Brodkin’s work on American Jewish racialization describes this movement from earlier “off-white” racial positioning toward incorporation into whiteness, which means the social position of a family can change faster than the family stories about what belonging has historically required. 

A Jewish child can therefore grow up with substantial social privilege and still receive messages shaped by grandparents or great-grandparents who fled pogroms, survived the Holocaust, escaped countries where Jews had limited rights, lost property, changed names, or learned that assimilation did not always provide lasting safety. Education may become deeply valued because knowledge and professional skill feel portable. Financial security may become important because property and social standing were once vulnerable. Family continuity may carry additional meaning because entire branches of a family disappeared within living memory.

Those messages reach children through attachment relationships, which is why Jewish identity at work can become connected to much more than deciding whether to attend an office holiday party. The employee deciding whether to tell her supervisor she cannot work on Yom Kippur may also be carrying years of family messages about visibility, antisemitism, being careful around non-Jews, proving that Jews are productive members of society, or knowing when drawing attention to Jewishness creates unnecessary risk. The present workplace may be welcoming, hostile, politically charged, or simply ignorant, and the nervous system is using all of the available information to decide how visible it is wise to become.

I have written more specifically about the experience of antisemitism and trauma in Healing Trauma and Antisemitism: A Path to Recovery with Somatic Experiencing. Read Healing Trauma and Antisemitism

How Intergenerational Trauma Shapes Workplace Belonging

Intergenerational trauma shapes workplace belonging because children do not inherit history as a textbook. They encounter history through the people raising them, the stories families repeat, the things adults become anxious about, the rules that seem especially important, and the behaviors that bring pride or fear into the relationship. Over time, those experiences help organize the attachment template because children are learning both what relationships require and what the larger world is believed to require from them.

A Black parent who has experienced racial discrimination at work may prepare her daughter differently for authority, evaluation, and professional environments because she already knows what the child may encounter. A Jewish parent whose family survived persecution may emphasize education, achievement, caution, and cultural continuity because those strategies carry meaning beyond ordinary career ambition. In both cases, the parent may be offering something protective and loving while also transmitting the fear, vigilance, and historical knowledge that shaped the parent’s own understanding of belonging.

Holocaust research gives us one concrete example of how intergenerational trauma can move through family relationships. A systematic review of Holocaust survivor offspring found evidence involving parental mental health, perceived parenting, attachment quality, family structure, later stress exposure, and psychophysiological processes, which means the intergenerational story involves relationships, family organization, and the environments in which children continue developing. 

Read the systematic review on intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust

This fits closely with how Centering Healing understands development because children build expectations through repetition. A parent’s warning about racism or antisemitism can be accurate information about the world, and the emotional intensity surrounding that warning also teaches the child how much danger may be attached to getting the situation wrong. If the family already contains attachment experiences where disagreement threatens connection, mistakes create humiliation, or achievement is one of the most reliable ways to receive warmth, the cultural lesson and the family lesson can begin reinforcing each other until monitoring other people’s perception feels essential.

A mother may become withdrawn when her daughter disagrees, a father may become critical when grades drop, or the adults around the child may become overwhelmed by strong feelings and expect the child to calm herself quickly. If that same child is also hearing that she needs to be twice as good, avoid giving people a reason to stereotype her, keep certain parts of Jewish identity private in particular environments, or remember how much earlier generations sacrificed, the attachment template begins organizing around a very sophisticated rule: powerful relationships and important opportunities can change when other people experience you the wrong way, so pay attention.

If you want to read more about this specific intersection, I have an earlier Centering Healing article on Transgenerational Trauma and Attachment(opens in new tab) that looks directly at how family history and attachment patterns can become connected across generations.

How the Unprotected Child Learns to Perform Belonging

The Unprotected Child is the Centering Healing concept I use for the child whose feelings, needs, boundaries, emotional reality, vulnerability, or need for advocacy were not consistently met with protection, attunement, co-regulation, understanding, and repair. That child may have been loved deeply, may have lived in a family that looked functional from the outside, and may have had parents who were doing everything they knew how to do. The developmental experience still teaches the child what happens when she needs something from another person and whether remaining connected requires her to monitor the other person’s response before she can stay connected to herself. 

When disagreement repeatedly threatens connection, the child can become unusually good at reading authority because noticing the first shift in another person’s face, voice, or body gives her time to adjust. When achievement reliably produces praise, warmth, or relief, excelling can become connected to the stability of the relationship itself. A child living around unpredictable moods may become excellent at detecting changes that other people barely notice, and those abilities can later look like being observant, intuitive, driven, agreeable, good with people, or unusually skilled at reading the room.

Culture can give those same abilities another purpose. The Black child may learn that reading White authority protects her from being stereotyped or unfairly disciplined, while the Jewish child may learn that understanding when Jewish visibility feels welcomed, tolerated, or risky protects social belonging. A Black Jewish child may be carrying both sets of calculations at the same time, along with whatever she learned inside her particular family about disagreement, success, anger, mistakes, and what she needs to do when another person’s opinion carries power.

By adulthood, these systems can overlap so completely that the adaptation feels indistinguishable from personality. You may genuinely be observant, conscientious, ambitious, polite, emotionally controlled, culturally fluent, and excellent at managing difficult people, while the history underneath those skills still matters because it tells us why certain situations require so much energy. I become interested in when observation turns into constant surveillance, when excellence stops feeling satisfying because it has become the minimum required to feel safe, and when reading the room happens so quickly that the room gets consulted before you do.

How Do Racial Stereotypes Affect Black Employees at Work?

Racial stereotypes affect Black employees at work by adding another layer of meaning to ordinary professional behavior. You can be five minutes late because a train stopped between stations and still feel yourself moving immediately into a larger calculation about whether your boss will see you as unreliable, while a White coworker who was late last week was allowed to experience the problem as traffic. You can receive critical feedback and find yourself trying to determine whether the feedback is useful while also wondering whether the person giving it has placed you inside a stereotype about competence, anger, laziness, intelligence, or professionalism.

For Black women, gender and race can make the calculation even more specific because anger, confidence, leadership, appearance, and emotional expression are filtered through stereotypes that have existed long before the individual employee entered the room. Research on racial battle fatigue describes the cumulative psychological, emotional, behavioral, and embodied labor created by repeated racialized experiences, and a 2026 study following Black women across education and professional environments found patterns of surveillance, tone policing, intellectual devaluation, and emotional regulation demands that continued into professional life. 

This helps explain why racial stereotypes affect Black employees even when the person has a long record of competence and success. A promotion can increase authority while also increasing visibility, placing the employee in more rooms where fewer people share her identity and where mistakes have larger professional consequences. Success can therefore bring additional opportunities while the nervous system remains responsible for monitoring how much of that success feels secure.

The pressure to disprove stereotypes can also become a form of identity organization. You work harder, prepare more, speak carefully, control your anger, make sure nobody can call you lazy, and slowly the imagined gaze of the stereotype begins influencing how you evaluate yourself. Even when the goal is to prove the stereotype wrong, the stereotype can remain present in the room because your behavior is still being organized around its existence.

How Does Code-Switching Affect Mental Health?

Code-switching affects mental health partly through the amount of continuous monitoring it requires. Go back to the meeting with your boss and notice what happened in only a few minutes: you listened to the policy, remembered what happened to your coworker, formed an opinion, considered your boss’s personality, anticipated a racial stereotype, changed your language, altered your tone, watched your facial expression, delivered the revised sentence, monitored his reaction, and then returned to the meeting as though none of that required additional effort.

The same process can repeat across an entire day. You think about whether the email sounds too blunt, decide whether to mention your holiday, monitor how much anger is visible, calculate whether asking a question will make you look unprepared, decide which part of yourself feels appropriate at lunch, and notice whether a coworker’s comment is worth correcting. By the time you get home, you may feel anxious, irritated, mentally flooded, physically tense, exhausted, quiet, or desperate for everyone to stop asking anything from you because your body has spent the entire day processing interpersonal information that never appears on your job description.

That is why code-switching and mental health need to be discussed together. The adaptation can produce professional benefits while requiring enough emotional and cognitive labor that the person starts experiencing headaches, racing thoughts, stomach tension, burnout, difficulty concentrating, irritability, or the feeling that she becomes a different person the second she enters work. The cost can remain invisible because the work still gets done and the person may continue succeeding while using increasing amounts of internal energy to maintain the performance.

This is also where Racial Battle Fatigue becomes useful as a concept because the fatigue develops through accumulation rather than one dramatic event. The 2026 research on Black women’s experiences describes how racialized gender regulation can intensify across professional environments through surveillance, tone policing, and the need to continuously navigate institutional expectations. 

A Practice: Catch the Moment Presentation Becomes Protection

The next time you find yourself replaying something that happened at work, choose one specific interaction and slow it down before deciding whether you handled it correctly. This practice is meant to help you see the sequence clearly enough to know what your system was responding to and whether the adjustment you made still feels like a choice.

1. Write down what actually happened. Name the person, the subject, and what they said or did. “My boss annoyed me” gives you very little information, while “my boss said everyone needs to smile when customers become aggressive, and I disagreed” gives you an actual moment to follow.
2. Write down what you originally wanted to say or do. Try to capture the first response before you changed it for the room. This helps you recover the part of the interaction that belonged to you before you began calculating how another person might receive it.
3. Notice what you changed and what you were trying to protect. Maybe you softened the wording, smiled, lowered your voice, stayed quiet, overexplained, removed a cultural reference, avoided mentioning that you were Jewish, changed your hair, or made yourself more socially pleasant. Ask what you believed might happen if you did not make that adjustment.
4. Separate current evidence from familiar expectation. Look at what this boss, workplace, coworker, or institution has actually shown you, and then ask what feels familiar from earlier relationships, previous workplaces, family messages, racism, antisemitism, or other experiences. The purpose is accuracy, because your response may be shaped by several true things at once.
5. Decide what you want the adaptation to become next time. You may choose the exact same code-switch because it serves a goal you care about, or you may notice that you gave up more of yourself than the situation required. The shift begins when you can hear your own response before the adjustment becomes automatic and make a decision from there.

This kind of tracking is one way to begin changing a conditioned pattern because the sequence becomes visible enough to work with. You start recognizing when presentation is serving you, when it is protecting you from a current risk, and when an older attachment template has entered the interaction before you had a chance to decide what the present moment actually requires.

How Therapy Helps With Code-Switching and Workplace Stress

If you brought the meeting with your boss into therapy with me, I would want to slow down the moment before you found the sentence that felt safe enough to say. You might tell me the meeting was fine and that your boss listened, while I notice that you laugh when you repeat what you eventually said and your shoulders lift slightly as you start explaining why it was not a big deal. I would become curious about what you originally wanted to say, what happened inside your body when you imagined saying it directly, what you believed your boss would think about you, and what his actual history with disagreement has taught you.

From there, we can begin separating the different layers that became compressed into one reaction. Racism may be giving you real information about how Black women’s anger is interpreted, antisemitism may be influencing how safe Jewish visibility feels, your workplace may have genuinely rewarded certain forms of self-presentation, and your attachment template may already have years of practice treating another person’s discomfort as something you need to manage quickly. Therapy gives us enough space to keep all of that information available so you can see what belongs to the current environment, what belongs to earlier relational learning, and what choice you want to make now.

This is where the Unprotected Child matters because the child often learned to preserve connection by noticing everyone else first. She became skilled at reading the parent who withdrew, the teacher who underestimated her, the adult who became critical when she made a mistake, or the social environment that treated one version of her as safer than another. That adaptation helped her maintain connection and protection under conditions where she did not have the power to redesign the environment.

The adult has more possibilities, although the old sequence can still happen quickly. In therapy, we practice staying with the moment long enough for you to know what you think before the sentence changes, recognize anger while it is still yours, notice somebody else’s discomfort without automatically experiencing it as proof that you did something wrong, and decide whether code-switching serves a goal you have consciously chosen. The work gives you more access to yourself while you continue navigating environments that may still contain racism, antisemitism, power differences, and real consequences.

What Does Belonging Feel Like When You No Longer Have to Prove Yourself?

The question I keep returning to throughout this article is what belonging feels like when your nervous system no longer experiences every room as another place where your acceptability needs to be demonstrated. You can remain ambitious, polished, thoughtful, professional, culturally fluent, perceptive, and extremely good at reading people because those capacities may genuinely belong to you. The change is that they become resources you can use rather than obligations you have to perform continuously in order to feel secure.

A mistake can become one mistake instead of evidence that you failed your family, confirmed a stereotype, wasted an opportunity, or proved that somebody else was right to question whether you belonged. Anger can remain information about what matters to you while you decide how you want to express it. Cultural or religious visibility can become something you assess according to the actual environment rather than something your body automatically hides before you have consciously decided what feels right.

That is where self-trust starts becoming practical. You know what the room is asking from you, you know what your history taught you to anticipate, you know what the current risk actually is, and you can remain present enough inside yourself to decide what you want to do with all of that information. You may still code-switch, soften your language, choose privacy, work harder, or leave some parts of yourself outside a particular room, and the difference is that the decision increasingly belongs to you.

When belonging has consequences, presentation can become protection. Healing creates more room between the consequence and the presentation so that protection no longer requires losing access to the person you were trying to protect in the first place.

Continue Exploring

If this article helped you recognize how quickly you begin monitoring yourself when another person’s perception carries weight, my article on the Attachment Template  Attachment Template(opens in new tab) goes deeper into how repeated relational experiences become the internal map your body uses when authority, criticism, connection, and belonging feel uncertain.

If the intergenerational piece was what stayed with you, you can continue with Transgenerational Trauma and Attachment(opens in new tab), where I look more closely at how family history and relational patterns move across generations.

If these patterns are affecting your work, relationships, self-trust, or your ability to remain connected to what you know and need when another person’s perception carries power, this is also the kind of work I do in therapy at Centering Healing. I work online with adult women in California, and therapy gives us the space to understand what your current environment is asking of you, what your attachment template has learned to anticipate, and how to build enough internal stability that your choices increasingly reflect your own needs, limits, values, and preferences.

Research and Further Reading

• Dr. Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome framework explores multigenerational oppression, continued racism, and adaptive survival behaviors within African American communities. Explore Dr. Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome framework
• Courtney McCluney and colleagues studied how racial code-switching affects perceived professionalism for Black employees in workplace contexts. Read the racial code-switching and professionalism research
• The systematic review of Holocaust-survivor offspring examines parenting, attachment, family structure, stress vulnerability, and psychophysiological pathways in intergenerational trauma. Read the Holocaust intergenerational trauma systematic review

Keep exploring this pattern

If you recognize how much energy goes into monitoring yourself, anticipating other people’s reactions, or replaying interactions afterward, you may also recognize some of the patterns in The 5 Hidden Patterns Trauma Survivors Don’t Realize Are Running Their Lives. The guide walks through several ways earlier relational experiences can continue shaping how you respond to other people now, with questions and practices to help you begin noticing what happens in your own life.

Get the free guide 

If you want to work on this in therapy

In therapy, we can slow down these moments enough to understand what you are responding to in the present, what you have learned to expect from other people, and what happens inside you when speaking freely begins to feel risky. The work is not about teaching you to ignore racism, antisemitism, workplace hierarchy, or the realities you have learned to navigate. It is about helping you understand the full calculation you are making so that you have more access to what you think, feel, want, and choose while you are making it.