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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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Clance and Imes avoided the word ‘syndrome’ because syndrome is often associated with a disease or disorder; instead they called it the ‘impostor phenomenon.’
2. We use the term ‘Black’ in reference to all Black people of the African diaspora, including African American, Afro Caribbean, and Black Africans.
3. We use the term ‘Latinx’ to decenter the patriarchal nature and gender binary within the terms ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina,’ and to cover all the LGBTQ+ possibilities.
4. The word ‘minoritized’ acknowledges a system of actionable policies and practices that racialize people of color, which is in contrast to the passive term ‘minority,’ which implies an inherent (and normalized) state of affairs (Harper Citation2012). In this context, minoritized is useful in describing racism as a framework for understanding experiences of Black students.
5. A meta-analysis by Paradies et al. (Citation2015) employed a definition of racism as individualized, interpersonal, and systemic within societies, causing the inequitable distribution of power, resources, social and economic capital and capacities, and opportunities within and across racial or ethnic groups. The authors describe these forms of racism as manifesting in a multitude of ways through the enactment of entrenched beliefs, stereotypes, and prejudices.
6. In 2015, roughly half of Black engineering doctoral students had at least one parent who earned a post-secondary degree (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics Citation2017).