Why High-Achieving Black and Asian Women Don't Have Imposter Syndrome
- Jun 18
- 7 min read
Written by Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje Khalique is a visionary clinical consultant with 20 years of experience in mental health. She is the founder of rkTherapy, a London-based bespoke psychology consultancy, and a specialist in culturally attuned Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
You got the degree, the title, and the seat at the table, and you are exhausted in a way you cannot explain to anyone who was not standing where you stood to get there. Underneath that exhaustion sits a silent, lifelong battle with perfectionism and chronic self-doubt, the kind that has been there since long before the boardroom. When the cracks showed, the mainstream wellness world provided the nearest label, ‘imposter syndrome’. That label ignores the weight of racial trauma, and it ignores the fact that the systems you worked so hard to enter were never designed to include you. What you are carrying is not standard burnout, nor a confidence problem.
In psychotherapy, we are encouraged to look inward. We explore childhood experiences, family wounds, and the relationships that shaped us. But for many Black and Asian professionals in the UK, there is a gaping hole in this narrative.
While the textbooks teach about family dynamics, many develop an antenna, a survival mechanism built over decades of necessity. It is the ability to walk into a room and know, without a word being spoken, that someone wishes you were not there. You see it in the micro shifts of an expression, the subtle tightening of a jaw, or the "I wasn't expecting someone like you" look that lands before the handshake.
These subtle, overt, and covert messages teach that one's worth is determined by race, triggering a fight or flight response not by parents or childhood, but by a world that keeps telling them, particularly those of Black and Asian heritage, that they are not enough. The antenna keeps them safe, but it never switches off, and that is the part nobody is talking about. That is racial trauma. Trauma is not always the same as a diagnosis. Many people carry real, significant trauma and never develop a diagnosable condition like PTSD. They keep functioning, keep performing, keep showing up, and that is precisely what makes racial trauma so easy to miss. It does not need a diagnosis to be real, and it does not need a breakdown to be doing damage.
The imposter myth vs. the reality of bias
We must move away from the term imposter syndrome when discussing the experiences of Black and Asian women of the diaspora. The phrase implies an internal flaw, a deficit in confidence, or a personal shortcoming. Sexism and racism are not internal. They are structural and societal.
In fifteen years of clinical practice, I have never once heard a Black or Asian woman say, "I am going to get found out", or "I am a fraud", or "I got lucky". What I hear instead is that she must work twice as hard to be seen as equally capable, that she tolerates racism in wider society and sexism inside her own community as well. That is not imposter syndrome. That is chronic self-doubt built by what is happening around her, not a distortion inside her mind.
Consider the Black or Asian woman passed over for promotion for the third time, watching colleagues with less experience and fewer qualifications move ahead of her. Consider, too, losing that same promotion to a male colleague who plays golf with the CEO, while her own contribution goes unseen. This is not a lack of self-belief. It is two systems of bias operating on the same woman at once, one that favours those who look like the leadership, and one that favours those who sound like it. When the environment is rigged against you twice over, feeling like an outsider is not a flaw in your thinking. It is an accurate read of what is happening.
Black and Asian women often navigate racism and sexism simultaneously, in environments where they face constant scrutiny and are required to prove expertise their white male counterparts do not need to. Feeling isolated in that context is not a personal failing. It is an accurate reading of a space that was not built to include them. Calling this imposter syndrome blames them for a problem the system created, and that wrong diagnosis causes real psychological harm.
Resilience vs Tolerance: The DNA of survival
There is a misunderstanding in our society about resilience and tolerance, particularly for Black and Asian people of the diaspora. Tolerance is what is expected of them, to endure the anti-immigration tenor of social media, the hostility on the streets of London, and global news cycles that question the right to be here, all with quiet, integrated patience. Many Black and Asian people are expected to absorb it and show up the next morning without letting it show.
Resilience is what is built in response, the getting up despite gender bias and racial discrimination woven into daily lives, because for the Black and Asian diaspora, resilience is not a choice but a prerequisite for survival, and when professional, emotional, and physical survival is at stake, strength becomes a mandate. We praise resilience as a strength, an asset, something admirable to be congratulated for having. But resilience is not a gift these women were given. It is a price they have had to keep paying.
Despite the growing hostility in the media and the relentless immigration debate, I rarely hear these Black and Asian women report being signed off work for stress, anxiety, or burnout. They are still doing full hours, full duties, the same as before. Often, they have never taken a single day of sick leave in their entire career. That is what high achievers do, and it shows you something important. They are not struggling with confidence. They are absorbing real harm and still turning up to work every day.
This absorption of harm takes many shapes. It is being passed over for stretch assignments and visible projects that lead to promotion, being interrupted in meetings, or watching your idea credited to someone else, and carrying invisible labour such as mentoring junior colleagues or sitting on diversity committees with no recognition or extra pay.
Many Black and Asian women do not want to be more resilient. They want the luxury of turning the antenna off and existing in a space where they are not required to be unbreakable just to be seen as equal.
I have observed that for many women, mentorship is rarely the problem. Many have a mentor, someone who will sit with them, listen, and offer advice. What is really missing at the senior levels is sponsorship, someone who puts their own name and credibility behind you in the room you are not in, who pushes your name forward when the partnership or the board seat is being decided. Mentorship can exist quite comfortably without ever becoming sponsorship, and that gap is precisely where the old boys' club reasserts itself, because sponsorship runs on trust built over golf, dinners, and informal relationships that Black and Asian women are routinely never invited into.
The impact on the diaspora: Generations of survival
We celebrate the high achievers who succeed despite everything, but we do not talk honestly about what those costs are across the first, second, and third generations.
What I have observed consistently is that Black and Asian women of the diaspora carry a heavy psychological burden from layered racial trauma that standard therapeutic training never prepared me to address. When I trained, this was never mentioned once, because the assumption was that therapy designed by and for the white majority culture worked for everyone, and it does not. Racial discrimination and gender bias are not historical footnotes. They are active, daily pressures.
In the summer of 2024, the streets of Britain saw marches calling for Black and Asian communities to leave, and that was not an isolated event. For many, those images and headlines questioning their right to be here are an acute racial trauma landing on top of a chronic one (Chin et al., 2023), and watching them is not the experience of an outsider. Their belonging is being publicly debated, while they are simultaneously expected to get the children to school, walk into the boardroom, and perform at the highest level the next morning. Acute events do not land on a clean slate. They land on everything that came before, which is what the research on cumulative trauma shows us, and that is bicultural burnout in real time, the emotional and psychological cost of a resilience that should never have been necessary just to belong.
Resilience is not an option
Many Black and Asian women do not come to therapy asking to be more resilient. They are exhausted, burning out, quietly and from the inside. But it never looks messy. There is no breakdown in the meeting, no missed deadline, no public unraveling, only a modest, composed exit, because many of these women simply leave the job instead. Their burnout is tidy. It is orderly. It looks, from the outside, exactly like success, which is precisely why nobody sees it until it is named.
Post-traumatic growth is when people do not just survive adversity but are transformed by it (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2004), and that transformation is visible in every senior position these women have earned in environments that were not designed to include them. The women carrying those achievements are carrying something else, a deep, unnamed exhaustion that nobody has properly measured or named. It is bicultural burnout, the emotional price of a resilience that was never a choice, and it is time we treated it as the clinical reality it is.
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Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje is a clinical practitioner for a wide range of anxiety disorders and depression. She is dedicated to making quality psychological support accessible to high-achieving professionals in the legal and finance industries in London's high-stakes corporate world. During COVID-19, she recognised a global and increasing need for evidence-based support and developed a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) online, virtual platform and a mobile app. Designed to fit the demanding schedules of professionals not only in London but across Europe, the US, the Middle East, and Asia.
References:
Tedeschi, R.G. and Calhoun, L.G. (2004). Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
Chin, D., Smith-Clapham, A.M. and Wyatt, G.E. (2023). Race-based trauma and post-traumatic growth through identity transformation. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1031602.
