CW: racism, classism 

Fractured Belonging: Harvard’s History of Racial Imposter Syndrome

By: Sameer Khan

In this current period of racial reckoning, driven by nationwide protests against police brutality and for true justice beyond artificial words of sympathy, all eyes are on systems of authority—the police, the government, universities. Their responses—especially those of higher academic institutions that must responsibly train the next generation of thinkers and leaders—could very well reveal their commitment to their Black constituents or, “in failing to do so, reveal its emptiness.” Harvard University is not immune to these conversations—in fact, the College currently stands at its own inflection point in its reaction to allegations that Government Department Preceptor David D. Kane anonymously published several racist posts on his own site, Ephblog. In its opinion piece, The Crimson Editorial Board urgently directs the College to fire Preceptor Kane or—at the very least—place him on leave until a more conclusive decision can be reached, but the Editorial Board’s commentary uncovers an even more extraordinary finding in the history of Harvard: an increasing consciousness for Black students’ mental health. In the current climate, Black, mentally-ill students at Harvard are vulnerable; as humans, their “combination of [mental illness] and skin color amounts to a double bind,” but, as students, their very place at Harvard can be threatened further by feelings of fraudulence and ostracism. A look at The Crimson’s archives beyond 1970 provides the perfect lens to understand these changes, how, over time, the intersectional pressure of being a Black student at Harvard has contributed to an even more mentally-taxing sense of imposter syndrome.

While The Crimson Editorial Board delivers a strong case in protest to Preceptor Kane’s instruction of his Government 50 course, merely firing Kane cannot reverse the damage done to “the sense of belonging felt by Black students at the College.” Harvard’s anti-racist work should not dissipate with the removal of Kane—toppling the existing culture in which an allegedly racist preceptor felt welcomed and comfortable should be the College’s primary ambition. Surprisingly, over thirty years ago, Crimson writer Michael J. Bonin seemed to grasp Harvard’s role “in combatting racial discrimination.” He suggested that Harvard too easily pats itself on the back as some post-racial city on a hill, only concerned with “the subtle discrimination”—a strategy that has indirectly allowed the “violent bigotry to re-emerge” under the College’s nose. Such an opinion is only implicitly made in The Crimson Editorial Board’s piece. 

Yet, while Bonin makes this realization, there is little to no emphasis on the mental-health implications of racism toward Black students. Whereas “Fire David Kane” uniquely accentuates the “mental health struggles linked to the pervasiveness of systemic racism,” Bonin’s piece lacks this nuance. He views an assault on a Black student at Currier House by a proud, self-proclaimed “negro hit squad” without any peripheral vision; certainly, it is an issue of “blatant racial discrimination,” but it is a discrimination that further oppresses and subverts the Black student through his trauma and mental struggle as well. The discrepancies between these articles, written nearly three decades apart, wholly reflect the nation’s evolving conversations on mental health. About a decade before Bonin’s article was authored in 1988, racism supposedly afflicted Black Americans with a disease of “delusional anti-whiteness,” rendering them violent and wildly insane; thus, mental illness was distorted to some extreme, taboo concept—perhaps, it was not quite fit for discussion in The Crimson in 1988 as it might be in 2020 in relation to Preceptor Kane. Instead, to support Black students emotionally, former president of the College’s Black Student Association Camille Holmes suggested “a course or official discussions of American racial and ethnic groups” to “heighten racial sensitivity.” Interestingly, Holmes’ recommendation is in direct alignment with America’s traditional faith in education as being the “great equalizer”—presumably, it would cure Black students’ feeling unwelcome in predominantly white spaces.

Nevertheless, educational reform is only a portion of the social overhaul the more recent version of Crimson seeks for Black members of the Harvard community. Of the almost three-hundred articles tagged with “Mental Health” in The Crimson’s archives, over half have been published since 2015, many of which include deeper investigations into student mental-health beyond the common stress over midterms. The subjects of these pieces represent a marked shift from their predecessors, for they particularly center and amplify the student voice. This attention to the individual experience with mental health sets the stage for two striking Crimson articles, both dated to late 2015, that remarkably recognize how mental health is perceived and resourced differently for Harvard’s Black students. Both in reaction to “recent racially-charged events at Yale, Mizzou, and Harvard Law,” where Black law professors’ portraits were vandalized with black tape, the pieces are revolutionary for their shifted focus toward expanding mental-health resources on campus for Harvard students of color. Moreover, this activist approach was entirely grassroots. In November of 2015, a conference held between the Steve Fund, “an organization dedicated to wellbeing among students of color,” and the Harvard Black Alumni Society sought to encourage personal dialogue between both students and clinicians of distinct experiences with mental health. That Gayla and Hu’s piece covering the event was published as a news article only reinforces the steadily growing visibility of conversations about mental health on Harvard’s campus. This robust space finally tackled the especially debilitating sense of imposter syndrome among students of color, which psychologically makes them “feel ‘like an intellectual fraud’” and often leaves them to “[question] their career goals because of…racial microaggressions.” Whereas in 1988, issues of race and belonging were highlighted by white authors like Bonin, what is endemic to the new culture surrounding mental health at Harvard is the centering of voices of color. Forming almost a sort of peer-to-peer coalition, Harvard students are progressively challenging the “‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality” on campus and affirming each other’s experiences of stigma, depression, and imposter syndrome.

Like in the legacy of President Ronald Raegan’s policy of deinstitutionalization, the implementation of peer-to-peer counseling can still be tricky—at what point should students defer responsibility over a peer’s mental health to a professional? Building atop the foundations jointly laid a month prior by the Steve Fund and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, Diversify Counseling and Mental Health Services (CAMHS)—in a Crimson op-ed—advocated their own platform: an immediate restructuring of CAMHS to encourage greater “racial and ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, gender, and sexual diversity among […] clinicians.” Like Bonin, Diversify CAMHS is reminded “that Harvard is not exempt from social injustices,” but—unlike Bonin proposes—action can no longer be purely academic or theoretical, no longer in the hands of just the students. Diversify CAMHS’ op-ed is riddled with a sense of urgency—so great is the emphasis on “now,” on needing “clinicians who understand our unique frustrations and concerns now.” Similar insistence is conveyed in The Crimson Editorial Board’s “Fire David Kane,” which, too, loudly demands immediate institutional change on Harvard’s part to protect Black students’ very belonging on campus.

Both Crimson pieces carefully force the reader to consider the power dynamics between student and professor, between patient and clinician. The Crimson Editorial Board, for instance, wonders how “students of color” could “possibly navigate an advising appointment with an instructor they know questions their very place in college.” Though the Editorial Board makes an explicit assumption of Kane’s guilt here, what is central to their argument is that, regardless, on Preceptor Kane’s part, there has been a betrayal of Black students’ trust. Kane’s allegedly overt bigotry compounded with a potentially performative, unproductive response from the College would further isolate Black students, enabling the roots of imposter syndrome to seep even further into their psyches. On the other hand, Diversify CAMHS understands the crisis to lie in a lack of clinical representation. The group cites that, although “40 percent of the College identifies” as people of color, “only 25 percent of CAMHS clinicians identify” as such. Here, too, does imposter syndrome wreak its havoc—without people of color in positions of authority, students of color might harmfully reconsider their own worth in a culturally-authoritative academic setting like Harvard’s. By hoping to expand the number of tenured faculty members of color or to transform CAMHS in order to more accurately mirror student demographics, Diversify CAMHS acknowledges that “shared race or ethnicity” can successfully shatter “barriers that prevent students of color from seeking professional mental health services.” Ultimately, these identity barriers are only mutated forms of erasure—for instance, as Black feminist therapist Julia A. Boyd articulated in 1988, “to ignore the meaning of the client’s identity is to ignore the person.”

For a campus as ancient as Harvard’s, a delve into the community’s local history reveals much about our past, but even more about our future. This campus has watched us at our worst—centuries of vicious, traumatic enslavement of Black Americans—but has pushed us to new horizons, to discourse rightfully commanded by and centered around Black voices. Yes, these histories allow us to take the temperature of individual moments—a racially-motivated attack at Currier House, a groundbreaking conference on mental health, a disturbing controversy surrounding a Government Preceptor—but what is much more valuable are the larger movements sustained on Harvard’s campus. This exponentially rising concern for mental-health justice should inspire us—not to rest on our laurels and dance the discrimination away, but to reach for even more revolutionary action in diversifying resources for students of color, collapsing racist infrastructures, and further spotlighting the Black experience at Harvard. Ultimately, only through recognizing that this history is far from bookended can we hope to eliminate any feelings of fractured belonging.