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Is ‘Impostor Syndrome’ Just for White Women?
As people of color, the idea leaked into our lives even though we aren’t privy to the same advantages of being white
I’m mad at imposter syndrome for stealing time, energy, confidence, and a sense of self-efficacy from people of color. We don’t have time for that. We don’t need to make time for that.
Recently I’ve seen a number of social media posts by friends of color and acquaintances of color talking about dealing with imposter syndrome, and I despair that any of us should feel like impostors, ever, when regimes of whiteness, capitalism, and colonialism have already extracted so much from our communities. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have doubts, or question ourselves, or acknowledge when we fail or make mistakes or don’t live up to our or others’ expectations, standards, whatever. That is different or should be different from what “impostor syndrome” is.
“Impostor syndrome” seems to be another thing that many of us have internalized, perhaps especially those of us who work in proximity to white people in spaces such as academia, the arts, and the non-profit sector. Sadly, I can easily see a person of color going to a white therapist (because there are so few therapists of color) and talking about “impostor syndrome” as part of their mental health issues, and…the white therapist being unprepared to help their client. I know this is not all white therapists. I think it’s fair to say most lack the knowledge and skills to understand how racism and racialization affects our mental health: intergenerationally, throughout our life cycle, and on any given day. And it’s not just therapists, it’s white people in general. It (white supremacy as a system of dominance and control) is designed to be this way.
Racism and white supremacy attempt to steal from us, every day, a sense of worthiness, not simply on a national scale (as in, “You don’t belong in this body politic, in this nation”), but on the species scale. This is well documented. Please read The History of White People by the brilliant historian, and visual artist, Nell Irvin Painter if you haven’t already. Being a person of color in the United States is already, de facto and formerly de jure, to be considered to be an inferior version of a…
