This study examines the work experiences of tenure/tenure-track women of color faculty at predominantly White public research extensive universities. Using a woman of color feminist epistemology and a theoretical framework of attributional ambiguity from social psychology and emotional labor from organizational communication, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with eighteen participants. The interview data was coded and then analyzed using Fairclough's work on organizational discourses and earlier work on intertextuality and social change. The analysis found that women of color faculty negotiate through paradoxical discourses of whiteness and diversification. Women of color faculty experience attributional ambiguity in the tenure review process, a process shaped by paradoxical discourses of clear un-biased formal written criteria and informal criteria generated through racialized mundane everyday communication interactions with White colleagues. The analysis also revealed that women of color faculty produce emotional labor in their everyday negotiations through these paradoxes where they are expected to contribute to diversity while being evaluated using White standards for research, teaching, service and collegiality. Women of color faculty described paradoxical situations of rhetorical coercion that required them to produce social change on diversity while emotionally caretaking Whites in a culture of racial deference. Women of color faculty developed a communicative strategy of discursive vigilance where they monitor discourses of emotions and social political hierarchies throughout their everyday interactions. This study makes theoretical contributions to attributional ambiguity in social psychology by using a discursive approach. This study also makes theoretical contributions to emotional labor studies by extending the concept beyond formally required management of feelings and displays of emotions in service workers to the discursively formed requirements to maintain deference to social hierarchies within organizations. These findings are then used to make concrete recommendations for best practices to improve the retention of faculty of color in higher education including creating critical mass through communication and formal recognition of emotional labor in diversity work by faculty of color. Lastly this study makes contributions by developing a feminist woman of color strategic listening and disclosure methodology based on an analysis of interracial communication between participants and researcher during the interviews.