Racism camouflaged as impostorism and the impact on Black STEM doctoral students

Abstract

Black doctoral students in engineering and computing fields experience racialized stress, as structural racism in STEM takes a toll on their sense of belonging and acceptance as intellectually competent in comparison to White and some Asian peers and faculty. Black doctoral students are often told by campus administrators that the source of this racialized stress is impostorism and it is curable. In this article, we employ phenomenological analysis to examine how 54 Black engineering and computing students experience racism marketed as impostor syndrome (syndrome meaning in their heads). Results show that 51 of our study participants understood their experiences as both impostorism and racism, as some realized that racism created the conditions for being racially positioned as an impostor. We problematize impostorism peddled by campus administrators as a cover for racism, once again placing onus on students and claiming they have irrational but curable behaviors, while institutional and individual racism in STEM runs rampant by design.