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.

摘要

工程和计算机领域的黑人博士生经历着种族化的压力，因为与白人和一些亚洲同龄人和教师相比，STEM 中的结构性种族主义损害了他们的归属感和智力能力。校园管理人员经常告诉黑人博士生，这种种族化压力的来源是冒名顶替，而且是​​可以治愈的。在本文中，我们采用现象学分析来研究 54 名黑人工程和计算机专业的学生如何经历被称为冒名顶替综合症（综合症在他们脑海中的意思）的种族主义。结果表明，我们的研究参与者中有 51 名将他们的经历理解为冒名顶替和种族主义，因为一些人意识到种族主义为在种族上被定位为冒名顶替者创造了条件。