How Students of Color Confront Impostor Syndrome

Dena Simmons’s talk shifts impostor syndrome from a private deficit of confidence to the ways schools make students question their belonging. A scholarship takes her from the Bronx to a boarding school and greater physical safety, but also another insecurity: becoming acceptable by editing herself.

She recalls a teacher publicly correcting her pronunciation of asking, a classmate’s disgust at her hair products, and someone watching valuables when she enters a room. Language, hair and bodily presence become racialized and classed evidence. Harm does not require academic failure; doctoral credentials and professional success do not automatically dissolve the feeling of being a token or exception.

As a Black woman, Simmons also describes monitoring whether speaking firmly will be reduced to anger. Returning to teach in the Bronx, she centers students’ lives, histories and identities. The responsibility moves from students adapting better to schools providing conditions of learning that do not demand self-erasure.

The first-person form lets small scenes accumulate, but it is not a national causal study. A loving classroom cannot substitute for housing, food or social protection; Simmons acknowledges limits to what she could control. Respect for identity and academic achievement should not become opposing choices.

Goldman’s The Child and Its Enemies offers a historical critique of adult educational authority. Research on children’s intellectual stereotypes examines labels and interests experimentally. Testimony, political argument and experiment retain different evidentiary boundaries while asking who can learn without erasing themselves.