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    'Racial Impostor Syndrome': Here Are Your Stories

    We got more than 100 letters from our listeners about how y'all feel like fakes. Here are some of our favorites.
    by Leah Donnella Jan 17, 2018 5 minutes
    "Racial impostor syndrome" is definitely a thing for many people. We hear from biracial and multi-ethnic listeners who connect with feeling "fake" or inauthentic in some part of their racial or ethnic heritage.

    It's tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a "racial impostor." For one Code Switch follower, it's the feeling she gets from whipping out "broken but strangely colloquial Arabic" in front of other Middle Easterners.

    For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it's being treated like "just another tourist" when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, "Is this allowed?"

    In this week's podcast, we go deep into what we're calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that's, in some ways, all about this.

    Here's how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to

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