- There's this really pivotal scene
in the Thanksgiving episode of the show "Masters of None".
Angela Bassett plays a mom.
She's a mother to Denise.
She turns to her, she says, "Honey, we're minorities
"and we have to work twice as hard to get half as far."
(slow acoustic guitar music)
For me, Imposter Syndrome, there was never one big moment.
It was all kind of like smaller moments.
One of the first ones I felt was
I went to a very diverse high school.
There was like Latinos, black people,
Asian people, Indian people, and I ended up going
to college in Providence, Rhode Island,
and I went to this liberal arts college.
I was there on a scholarship,
and I remember my first day on campus.
It was a sea of white people,
and I was so surprised, and I just thought the world
was like my high school.
I never felt such a lack of diversity.
It was really shocking to me, and I felt insecure.
I think I worked hard because I wanted to convince myself
that I belonged there.
- To me, Imposter Syndrome is a person who never takes in
their successes and always feels like they're waiting
on the next shoe to drop, or waiting on somebody
to find them out.
When I started my company Mae B,
which is a stationary company for women of color,
I remember hitting these really big milestones,
and one of them was I was featured in Essence Magazine
six months into starting my business,
and I could never take that in.
I could never say, you know what?
This happened because I was bold enough
to reach out to the magazine.
This happened because I started this company from scratch.
It was never about what I did.
It was about, well maybe it was just the universe,
but it wasn't about my hard work, dedication
to making that happen.
- My first paid internship was a non-profit in D.C.,
and it was for an internship program for my college,
and other colleges in California and also had
a couple of Ivy League schools involved with it.
I was one of maybe five students that had a paid internship,
and there were about 200 students in the program.
I kept telling myself that I didn't deserve
to have a paid internship.
The Ivy kids didn't have a paid internship.
It didn't make sense to me despite having worked before
and being a politics major and being in D.C. where politics
is such a big thing, I just told myself that it was luck.
Kids who I felt were more qualified or deserved it
more than I did, didn't have the same experience that I had.
- Once I started becoming a manager and leading teams,
and being the head of departments and things like that,
more often than not, not only am I the only woman,
but I'm the only person of color.
- When you're a black woman, you don't get to be mediocre.
You don't get to walk into a place and say,
you know what, hmm, I'm just gonna be all right today.
- I think black women are taught
that we are not deserving, as much as I hate to say that,
and I think that it stuck with me unfortunately.
I work hard and consciously I feel
that I am deserving of things,
but subconsciously I don't feel that way.
I attribute everything to luck
as opposed to just attributing it to me.
- I think Imposters Syndrome is something that
as women of color, we're always going to come across,
and it's really how do you handle it?
Feeling alone, feeling like a fraud,
feeling like wait, how did I get here?
Do I deserve to be here?
- And there's pressure as a black women
to always be strong, to always be fearless,
to always have this hardened exterior
because if we show any part of ourselves
that is actually human, then that makes us weak,
or that makes us less valuable.
- I have to keep telling myself that everyone
does not necessarily know more than me,
or deserved to be here any more than I do.
- These are things that I have to remind myself
every single day because if I don't,
I'll fall back into this place where it's like
okay, what happens when somebody doesn't think
I'm good enough or am I actually good enough?
- And there's that old saying, "fake it 'til you make it",
and I just kind of try to do that
until I realized I'm not faking it anymore.
I'm just like, I'm just slaying it.
(slow, relaxing electronic music)
(creaking sign)