I already know I am going to lose.
I am embedded in this application page, a blinking cursor while the stupid battery on my laptop corner rages red. There’s a lot that needs to be done. I need to be methodical, calculated, curated and presentable for this opportunity.
I reread my first statement of interest. “Don’t I sound nonsensical? Oh god, is this even relevant?” I scrutinize. I checked the “Other” box, because it’s more palatable than the baggage of “African American,” somehow more predictable and tangible than “Pacific Islander.” Explicitly naming myself is damning. I don’t like my odds. My eyes readjust on a photoshopped LinkedIn profile picture, and my insecurities scream. I look ridiculous. This headshot is my detached doppelganger: an uninspiring, less-than version of me, plastered onto a page, frozen into a smile I hope resembles “Black excellence.”
All I can see are the white spaces. The margins of error. Every gaping blank seems to say something about me. Somewhere, I’ve read in between the lines and learned the language of my inadequacy. The cursor blinks. One, two, three seconds of hesitation. The cursor takes another victim, closing the tab. I’m erased and consumed into the blank page, a white space before the rejection letter could read out my name.
When did I get so good at predicting my own failure?
The playing field has never been level. Educational disparities decide who arrives prepared. The racial wealth gap shapes who can afford to take that unpaid internship or take a month-long “volunteering” sabbatical to South Africa instead of working for a paycheck. Discrimination continues to rampage through hiring and advancement, while unequal access to mentorship and professional networks determines who knows which doors exist and whether they have someone willing to open them. We may stand at the same starting line, but some of us have been taught to see our skin color as a prediction of where we’ll finish.
This is an axiom coddled between bedtime stories and a first grader’s tears shed over fitting in. It is a truth taught to every Black child who observes a class and can find no other who resembles him. It is a conditioning that trains the Latine teenager that they shouldn’t expect the statistics to lean in their favor. It is a preparation for a world that is cruel and exclusionary. But when does this precaution turn into an insecurity? When do the odds not become a measure of my defiance, but ones that magnify a fear of failure?
My insecurities are intertwined within the foundations of this campus. The nagging suspicion of imposter syndrome is not just a modern-day story, but a project UC Berkeley scholars have attempted to understand by turning differences in achievement into questions of something fixed, measurable and biological.
UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen gave this logic one of its most disturbing forms, treating racial disparities in measured intelligence as potentially rooted in genetics. “The number of intelligence genes seems to be lower, over-all, in the black population than white,” Jensen had articulated to The New York Times Magazine in 1969. A damning “proof” of our difference. A damn “principle” of our disadvantage.
And although I reject Jensen’s eugenic conclusions, I recognize the uncomfortable echo it whispers on our campus — in the weeder classes that seem to discriminate on the basis of high school preparedness rather than knowledge, or the club culture that consciously and unconsciously weeds out the hint of diversity. There is a forever-beating impulse to mistake where we begin for where we are capable of ending. I see the distance between myself and everyone ahead of me and call it inadequacy. I see unfavorable odds and call them destiny. Before anyone else can determine that I don’t belong, I cut my losses and do it for them.
I’ve entered rooms time and time again to count. Not the number of seats available, nor the familiar faces, but the students whose skin resembles mine. I’ll find one, tucked in the back somewhere, making our minority even smaller as we condense and crawl into ourselves. Metamorphosing and wanting to be swallowed by the sea of unfamiliarity, and going by unnoticed. Everyone seems to have arrived already knowing one another, exchanging introductions and academic jargon with an ease that rubs off as condescending. I always inherit my place acutely aware of the contrast I provide.
A question is posed, and although I may know the answer, I wouldn’t dare steal the opportunity from someone more competent. I’d practically mouthed it beneath my breath, flexing my hand in a threat to raise it. But, I’m still searching to sound more articulate. To sound more than impressive. To find words in a foreign tongue to my root language of inadequacy. Words that won’t betray the possibility that I don’t belong here. I’d managed to make myself invisible and small in a room where I already felt painfully visible.
I’m tired of calling it humility or a quiet form of grace. Rather, it’s a cruel form of Pavlov’s conditioning experiment. An assumption, like Jensen says, that I have a fixed ending. I had spent years rejecting the notion that race could predetermine my potential, only to begin predicting my own failure through a fragmented piece of that lens. I feared my identity did not empower me, but made me weak. I wanted to believe that my Blackness wasn’t at the end of the road or the foot of my bed ready to count me out. But the most insidious consequence of anticipating exclusion is learning to do it more efficiently than any stereotype, statistic or weeder class could offer.
I wonder when I became a part of my own culling. I wonder why I learned to doubt myself in the same breath as this exclusionary world that surrounds me. I wonder if I will ever ignore the doubts of my qualifications, the checked boxes, to say “F— it all” and fill those white spaces.
I’m not arguing that racial disparities are imaginary. I’m not preaching that I’ve conquered my imposter syndrome, or that sole individual determination can fix systemic inequality. But understanding the odds should not be synonymous with surrendering to them. I cannot control every judgment made about my qualifications or the potential ingrained in the color of my skin. I can never guarantee myself a place in medical school, nor promise that the distance between the starting and finish lines will ever feel fair. But the world has found enough ways to equate my potential with a numerical value, a tragic ending that doesn’t need self-sabotage added into the mix.
I don’t know if I’m going to win. But I should stop losing before I’ve even begun.