Can Emotional Education Eradicate Social Code Changes and the Imposter Syndrome?

Dr. Kimberly Harden considers herself a lucky impostor, but her current resume is impressive. She became the first African-American professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Seattle, incorporated social justice into the school curriculum, and established the scholarship, Dream, Plan, Do.™

However, there is one thing that this outstanding teacher has not been able to achieve, namely, a feeling of belonging in the academic community. This is an attribute that is sometimes also missing from members of the majority group, but it is necessary to recognize that this deficiency most frequently affects socially vulnerable groups.

In addition to the political and economic disadvantages that have been widely discussed in previous articles, there are other more singular elements that restrict the ability of people of color and other minorities to integrate fully into a community. Micro-aggressions and imposter syndrome seriously affect the educational experience of the students as well as the working lives of members of academia.

What is social code change?

“Social code change” is the dynamic in which a person belonging to a social minority has to switch between codes or cultural languages, use different types of interactions, or make dialectical changes to facilitate their integration into the dominant group of their circles.

On the surface, this seems an effective strategy to connect with the majority, but Harden argues that instead of facilitating communication, it causes minority groups to become invisible, forcing “a one-size-fits-all” public behavior that perpetuates the cultural traits of the dominant group. This pattern becomes more evident with the use of slogans such as, “Be authentic at work.” According to Harden, this social instruction is given much more often to people whose cultural behavior differs from the norm.

“People really don’t want me to be authentic at work.”

For the University of Seattle professor, the discourse that calls minorities to be authentic in academic spaces is just a kind way to point out the personal aspects that don’t fit with the dominant culture and the innate racism in the work communities that gives a negative tone to actions that would seem innocuous if they came from a member of the social majority.

“When I didn’t stop to talk to my colleagues because I only had five minutes to run to teach, they considered me rude or antisocial. When they saw me interacting with teachers and staff of color, they thought I was a radical of the pro-black movement. If I laughed or expressed joy, they would catalog me as noisy or ghetto,” says Harden.

This interaction laden with the negative dismantling and interpretation of the conduct of social minorities forms the basis of the systemic violence that minorities face daily in academic and other work areas. A subtle form of what is known as gatekeeping, it is used in the wrong way, redirected to maintain the mechanisms of power of the social majority and the exclusion of minorities.

How does the relationship between gatekeeping and imposter syndrome work?

Gatekeepers are necessary members of any community based on the obtention and validation of knowledge. Ideally, they are people who dominate a specific epistemological field, they have a great appreciation of the community, and they use their experience to validate new developments, ideas, and interactions within the community that studies that area of knowledge.

But what happens when we confuse experience with self-confidence and the security that projects us? When these validators, whether false or authentic, use their powers to reject new ideas, perspectives, or people, wouldn’t they really be drowning out voices that their field of knowledge needs to diversify and grow?

“I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one potential engineer lost his enthusiasm for the field just because of a bad experience he had while trying to seek help.”

The learning and practice of programming is a very competitive area. “Over the years, I’ve heard colleagues refer to other classmates or candidates that they interview as idiots who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag; I’ve seen the blank eyes masking annoyance when novice engineers ask questions; I’ve heard the negative comments about boot camp graduates and self-taught programmers,” says Nick Scialli, a programmer engineer and frequent contributor to Hackernoon Magazine, exposes the toxic core of the practice of gatekeeping when it is not used to safeguard the standards of a field of knowledge or work but, instead, to undermine those who want to develop themselves in this field.

Scialli argues that practices that promote negativity and exclusion based on how much the person knows about the subject or judgment about his or her ability according to age, experience, gender or some other social attribute make it impossible not to begin to doubt ourselves and our belonging to the academic or professional spaces in which we work. This is the root of the imposter syndrome.

What is an imposter syndrome, and how does it affect people?

The Imposter Syndrome is defined as a psychological pattern in which the individual doubts his achievements and suffers from a constant internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. The reasons why this profile is presented are varied and can be internal, but the problem is aggravated by social practices that facilitate the exclusion of people who have just entered a field of knowledge or who belong to a social minority.

In the case of apprentices and novices, the combination of their internalized fear and these social practices can lead to their departure from the field of work or knowledge that they want to master. “I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one potential engineer lost his enthusiasm for the field just because of a bad experience he had while trying to seek help,” Scialli explains, there’s a difference between teaching the aspirants and discouraging them. This is exemplified in implementing measures to include minorities and creating an illusion of integration but falsely thinking that their cultural conduct should be similar to the majority.

Authenticity, as well as diversity, are popular words, the meaning of which we do not all fully understand and have not been able to incorporate into the soc
ial trends, as Dr. Harden explains. Being yourself in work and academic spaces can trigger patterns of gatekeeping that would cause an uphill social battle, at best, or the emergence or aggravation of the imposter syndrome, at worst. “The battle against racial fatigue is real; I know firsthand that showing too much authenticity can leave people of color out of work.”

Dr. Harden adds that this racial fatigue, consequent from the call to be authentic at work and the subsequent cultural clash, was the reason she quit her job. The change of social code and the constant need to defend cultural behaviors to keep others comfortable were exercises in oppression that became exhausting for the teacher.

It is here that the monitoring and validation of ideas, behaviors, and people in a field of knowledge cease to be a resource of quality control and becomes a mechanism for both exclusion and social oppression. How can we begin to detect and dismantle negative gatekeeping, while also treating the epidemic of imposter syndrome? Through emotional intelligence.

An individual proposal for a collective problem

Broadly speaking, gatekeeping is external negative feedback, and the imposter syndrome is internal negative feedback. To mitigate their effects and eventually eliminate these patterns, we need to make use of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage one’s emotions and those of others through self-awareness, self-control, motivation, empathy, and social communication. How can these skills help us stay constant in our academic or work goals as well as navigate social imbalance without losing enthusiasm for our field of study or work?

Indeed, having emotional intelligence would not help to eliminate the attitudes of people who arbitrarily exclude or demerit others, nor would it magically eliminate the problems that fuel a sense of insecurity and anxiety for individuals, but it is a useful tool for interpreting, analyzing, and understanding both the origin and the particularities of the negative feedback we receive, as opposed to just dealing with the psychological impact of them.

Emotional intelligence helps us decipher a crucial difference with respect to our dialogue with ourselves and our interactions with others. Constructive criticism and self-analysis are not the same things as discrediting and self-depreciation; the first two are useful resources for growth; the latter are modes of exclusion and becoming invisible.

“The battle against racial fatigue is real; I know firsthand that showing too much authenticity can leave people of color out of work.”

An emotionally intelligent person can discern when the feedback he receives from himself or others is useful and focused on his growth. This is how it is possible to listen to messages that are useful and maintain a healthy emotional distance from those that are not. Having established its value as a resource for individuals, we cannot, at the same time, say that emotional intelligence is the final solution to systemic problems woven into the social fabric, such as sexism, racism, or the misuse of gatekeeping.

However, it is an invaluable resource to assimilate their origins and navigate environments in which these practices are present. So, when universities and companies put forth efforts to make emotional intelligence part of the academic and work culture, the incidences of exclusion and becoming invisible are reduced.

Knowing oneself, knowing others, and knowing how to communicate from a perspective of openness, flexibility, and empathy are the most basic exercises to integrate diverse, minority groups without generating harmful practices such as a change of social code, gatekeeping, and the imposter syndrome.

Sofía García-Bullé

Share

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0