Staring at my laptop, I re-read an email asking for story submissions for a project in which I registered interest. The deadline is fast approaching, but my mind is scrabbling fruitlessly for words, the ever-present feeling that no one will possibly be interested in anything I have to say and that I should just not bother working its way to the front of my thoughts, a wriggling worm of imposter syndrome that eats up my confidence, undermines my faith in my own abilities and holds me back from everything from pitching new publications to making new friends.
Imposter syndrome has been a living parasite inside my head for so long I can barely remember its absence. A recent revisit through my teenage diaries as I cleared out old belongings following my father’s passing gave me a sharp, jarring insight into things perhaps best left forgotten – or perhaps not. The appalling news of Jason Arday’s horribly premature death following a cruel, malicious and unapologetically racist smear campaign ricocheted me back into my own time studying in an elite academic institution, details painfully journalled of how the willful yet hardworking and ambitious young woman I was became eroded to dust by the protracted and systemic bullying I experienced throughout my time there, in the aftermath of my graduation, and tellingly before I even started there.
From the off, I was marked as an outlier – as someone who didn’t fit the mould, who must have been let in by accident or to fill quotas. This was both inferred and boldly vocalized by both staff and students at my sixth form college (high school) who were happy to question in my presence how ‘someone like me’ could have secured such a prestigious spot. On arrival, I was immediately made to feel unwelcome among the throngs of wealthy white youngsters having animated discussion about their gap years, ski trips and trust funds. I kid you not – some of my earliest conversations with fellow students involved the explanation of what a Coutts trust fund was and what it meant to be independently wealthy, with my ignorance a source of snide amusement. These were teenagers who reveled in their money and privilege, with whom I had nothing in common and who enjoyed looking down on me. They had also been spoon-fed all the academic hacks our professors were looking for, having gone to the right feeder schools whose very well-paid job it was to ensure they could deliver the goods straight out of the post. I feel ashamed to say I struggled to keep up. I wasn’t lazy, but I didn’t know how to cram and there was no one to teach me. I had never worked so hard, at such a pace, and I had never faltered academically before. Asking for help was emphatically looked down on, and my attempts to reach out for support were aggressively shut down by my professors, including biting letters promising my expulsion if I couldn’t handle the pressure.
My peers were equally dismissive and mocking of me, both academically and socially. Unlike the other students, I wore bright colours, flares and mini skirts, not tracksuits in navy and grey. I didn’t play sports and my parents didn’t socialise with their parents. I also had a regional accent – well-hidden but still a far cry from their communal bray. Most damningly of all, I answered back. I didn’t make myself small or act like I was grateful to be there – I spoke up in class and socially, refusing to let what can only be described as bullying transform me into their vision of quiet, submissive, poor South Asian girl they thought I should be. I kept pushing, kept working, got better at giving the system what it wanted, thinking if I could just push hard enough, do well enough, I could still belong. But that isn’t how it works. Who belongs has been decided by a preordained script built on race, class and gendered prejudice that is impossible to break. I got through my three years but the constant cutting barbs, callous dismissals, biting rejections, snippy slights and unsupported failures slowly chipped away at my confidence until the girl who thought she could do anything began to believe the hype that she could do nothing.
I’d arrived among the dreaming spires aspiring to academia or politics. Believing this was the first step on my road to achieving my potential, to being a success. I left shattered, experiencing a debilitating breakdown shortly after results day. I abandoned my ambitions, my insides forever twisted from being shown my place. I had chosen my almer mater because I thought I belonged to that world, that life – but even though I passed, I had failed. The damage to my self-esteem was irreparable. As a young woman of colour from a provincial town, I was used to walking around with a target on my back, but when it followed me to a place I thought was safe, a place I had earned my right to be at, a place I had envisioned as the home of the best and brightest who surely must be too evolved to be prejudiced, that was more than I could bear. I broke.
Jason Arday stuck it out. He believed in and exercised his talent and his skills, and achieved in a way I can only dream of. Not only that, he wasn’t afraid of making the most of his success. Uncowed, he pushed his head above the parapet, tragically yet seemingly inevitably inciting contemporary incarnations of the same mass of amorphous human hatred who stole my dreams to rain all their cruel bile down on him because that is what they do. Those, like Arday, who shone so brightly it terrified the academic elite, run the risk of being subjected to this type of witch hunt whose only goal is to prove that people of colour can’t make the grade, can’t be trusted, don’t follow the rules and are not as talented or as worthy. They itch to put us in our place, normalising double standards for success and for punishment, with people of colour assumed guilty until proven innocent, and often long after. In a profession where reputation is everything, this is the ultimate way to mount a campaign of destruction.
When I see people of colour in positions like Arday’s I know what they have endured to get there, and will continue to endure as long as they stay. We know what language is used about us once those hefty wooden doors are closed and the straight cis white men are left alone in the room. Equality is a dog-and-pony-show in academia, as it across most of society, based on the constructed assumption that those with the most, the best education will choose to act rationally and without prejudice. I do sometimes mourn what I could have done with my life if I had had the right support. I have regrets about not being stronger, braver. I hate still labouring under the weight of the imposter syndrome I was force-fed and the confidence I lost. But most of all I am beyond sickened that the same elitist, bigoted culture I endured is unchanged decades later and is still so loaded with hate that it simply will not allow people of colour to succeed without exacting retribution. As a society, we should be ashamed and expect better from our thought leaders, but I fear we are a long way off that path ever being trodden.
Cultural Cuckoo 