Olerato K Mogomotsi | Imposter syndrome flows from real injustices towards the marginalised

A 2021 study on black engineering students in the US by Ebony O McGee titled Racism Camouflaged as Impostorism, revealed that black students were more inclined to question their academic abilities and struggled “internalising their success in racially hostile academic environments”.

Of the participants, a staggering 94% attributed their impostor attitudes to structural and intersubjective racism, linked to their marginal status in the academy. The study found that impostor syndrome was in fact weaponised and used as a cover for pervasive structural racism that still “runs rampant by design” in academic institutions.

One might take it to mean that these students shouldn’t be understood as facing impostorism but are in fact just victims of racism. However, this would be a mistake.  Effectively, studies like the McGee study and others are undoing our common understanding of impostorism.

They offer complex understandings of the phenomenon, which enable the sufferer of impostorism to relate differently to it, eventually setting themselves free from it. Although many of us might have experienced impostorism, everyday understandings of the term have only served to do so much damage in effectively “naturalising” the experience as something particular to the individual and a failure to relate properly to their own successes.

Ordinarily, we think of people who experience impostor syndrome as experiencing significant doubts about their competency. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, individuals credited for formalising the engagement with this phenomenon through psychological study, looked at how women were much likelier to question their capabilities – often experiencing anxieties that they might actually be frauds.

Key thing to note of course is that individuals who experience impostorism are not in fact impostors. Nonetheless, as the term gained popularity, it became a kind of individual neurosis.

This is where one fails to properly process one’s reality, suffers from self-doubt and is deluded by the mere fiction that one does not belong, but that if reminded how good one actually is, the problem would be solved. This common understanding of the impostor syndrome has made most people think impostor attitudes are only about individuals. This is harmful because it subconsciously reasserts the idea the individual is solely to blame for having impostor attitudes. 

Scholarship on impostorism has boomed in the last few years to help undo the prevalence of these victim-centric accounts of impostorism in favour of more environment-centric accounts. Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, wrote an impactful article in the Harvard Business Review titledStop Telling Women They Have Impostor Syndrome, where they argued that women in the workplace experience impostor attitudes because of systematic exclusion and bias.

In more philosophical discussions of impostorism, the late Katherine Hawley explored all kinds of scenarios where one might be justified in forming impostor attitudes because one’s environment does not affirm the person’s competency.

Shanna Slank focuses on “cultures of genius” that are pervasive in academic and other professional spaces as being responsible for setting unrealistic expectations on individuals that can’t be met and hence produce feelings of inadequacy in individuals sharing. What is critical to this approach is that it re-orients the individual towards strong confidence in oneself.  

As regards Black students and individuals from marginalised identities generally, I propose the term impostorisation instead.

Pervasive experiences of impostor attitudes in a liberal society follow from the opaqueness and covertness of injustices which are often difficult to articulate. This occurs a lot in predominantly white-male-class dominated institutions that covertly perpetuate injustices through standards of membership.

These thoughts are mainly inspired by Rodney Coates, who believes that covert racism works precisely because of how it makes that which it produces, including judgments and feedback about people, appear legitimate by being able to successfully blur the division between what “counts” as instances of injustice and what is legitimate. 

To suffer from impostorism is to have doubts effectively implanted in you as a result of encounters with injustices that you might not even see.

What does knowing this do? I think that knowing more about impostorism and the various ways it can be induced helps us realise that there’s actually nothing wrong with us per se. But this is not to encourage a dismissal of any evidence against one’s abilities as irrelevant or as always a product of injustice.

Rather, as my term, impostorisation suggests, we are better off appreciating that one is often made an impostor in a unique and personal way.

This is not a universal phenomenon. If you know that you are a victim of your environment, you are most likely to be easier on yourself, thereby best able to dismiss negative feedback.

More so, this awareness is emancipatory and may help you eradicate impostorism. As with the university students in McGee’s study, knowing and finding out that their impostor attitudes are brought about by systemic racism, not only frees them from the view that these attitudes are self-imposed, but allows them to focus on the real structural problems, which they are subjected to that bring about these attitudes in the first place.

• Mogomotsi is a junior philosophy lecturer at the University of Cape Town, a doctoral fellow at the Institute in the Humanities in Africa.