It Was Never Imposter Syndrome
People call it imposter syndrome, but that’s not it. Not for me. Not for most Black women I know. I’ve heard the diagnosis for as long as I can remember, navigating a world of self-comparison, but I’ve come to realize…Black women don’t actually suffer from imposter syndrome. That language never quite fit, although I easily slipped into it to make sense of the validity of my belonging. Trying to find words for a discomfort I couldn’t yet name
Imposter syndrome assumes a fear of incompetence. A sincerely held belief of being unqualified, unskilled, and most undeserving of our life’s station. But that’s not the fear I know as a constant companion. It’s not the one that lives in my body against my will. It’s not the one I see mirrored in other Black women either, the ones who have already done the work, already proven themselves, already been pointed to as answers.
We are over-qualified for our lives. We are the friend everyone calls. The one who figures it out. The one who carries the plan, the prayer, the backup charger, and the truth nobody else wants to say out loud.
We aren’t scared that we can’t do it but that once they really see us, once the curtain lifts and the smoke clears, they’ll decide we were fraudulent all along. Not because we lacked power, but because we were human. No, what we fear is not being discovered as incompetent. We’re afraid to be revealed as finite in the reach of our Black Girl Magic. Fear that once the curtain is pulled back, we won’t be allowed to remain. That our value is conditional on spectacle.
The Wiz Behind the Curtain
Imposter Syndrome isn’t ours to hold, we’ve been suffering much longer from The Wiz Syndrome.
Although I’ve never watched The Wizard of Oz nor its recent prequel work Wicked, I’m a devoted fan of the imaginative work of The Wiz. There’s a scene in The Wiz—the 1978 film, not the Broadway version—that still tightens my chest no matter how many times I see it. It’s when Dorothy and her companions finally confront the Wiz. Everyone along the way points Dorothy and her companions toward the Wiz. Every solution routes through him. Every hope is deferred upward. It reminds me of the expectations I’ve known many Black women to face.
The Wiz is the one whose name echoes through Emerald City like a promise. The one everyone insists can fix what’s broken. He is described as mighty, terrifying, omniscient. A god behind a curtain. A voice amplified by smoke and fire and spectacle. And when the curtain is pulled back, he’s just a man. Not evil, malicious, or fake in the way we usually mean fake. He’s just…human.
Powerful, Not Limitless
His power wasn’t an illusion exactly—there was evidence of it. Everyone pointed Dorothy to him. Everyone believed in him. The city functioned around his name. People’s lives were oriented toward his authority. He mattered. If there were no evidence of his power, he wouldn’t have so many witnesses testifying to its life changing consequences.
When he didn’t appear as expected—when the god-energy collapsed into a body with limits—he was named a fraud. That moment always devastates me, not only because I recognize Dorothy’s Black-Girl disappointment to climb, to carry, to lead, to create—only to be met, at the top, with unmet need. But because I recognize the perils of Black Girl Magic in the Wiz.
The Wiz wasn’t lying about his significance, just his limitlessness. Because the world demanded that lie of him. Because to be powerful and human is apparently too much to ask people to hold. That’s the exact bind Black women live inside. We are allowed to be brilliant as long as we are also endless. Wise, but never tired. Generous, but never depleted. Strong, but never in need.
We’ve been taught, subtly and relentlessly, that Black women must arrive already immaculate to be believed. The moment our humanity reveals our fatigued uncertainty, we risk being reinterpreted as fraudulent. Not less capable, but less divine.
The Wiz moves knowing that the spectacle matters more than the substance. That the image of power had to remain intact because people needed it to. He carried their projections because someone had to. And when that projection collapsed, he was punished for the lie they asked him to tell.
When Black Girl Magic Becomes a Cage
No one thanks him for what did work, they just call him a fraud and move on. Black women know this moment all too well. To give people tools, language, frameworks, healing—and still be told it wasn’t enough.
When I am questioning my place, I’m not afraid my work is bad. I am afraid my humanity will be misread as insufficiency. That fear doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from living in a world that mythologizes Black women while denying us grace. A world that crowns us gods and then resents us for bleeding.
The proximity of divinity and humanity is where I find most Black women standing: at the height of our craft, still uncertain whether we are allowed to rest inside it. Black women occupying that unbearable space of still asking quietly, am I allowed to be divine if I am not invulnerable?
Dorothy wants to get home.
The Scarecrow wants certainty.
The Lion wants permission.
The Tin Man wants to trust his own feeling.
And the Wiz? The Wiz wants to stop performing godhood long enough to be seen without losing everything.
Permission to Trust What We Feel
This is why the Tin Man’s song, “What Would I Do if I Could Feel”, has always reached deeper into me than any other moment in the score. When I hear “What would I do if I could suddenly feel, And to know once again that what I feel is real? I could cry, I could smile, I might lay back for a while” I know the Tin Man’s song isn’t about wanting emotion; it’s about wanting permission to trust reality.
That’s the condition so many Black women live inside, not as imposters. Not numbness, but distrust of our own interior witness. We feel deeply—but we’ve learned that feeling alone is not safe unless it’s validated, rewarded, or rendered useful.
The Curtain Falls, and We Remain
The Wiz Syndrome ultimately contemplates “What if the curtain drops—and they leave?” But here’s the quiet truth the film leaves us with:
They don’t actually need the Wiz to be infinite.They need him to be honest. Their recognition that they always possess what they’ve sought his power for doesn’t affirm his fraudulence because they already had it. It affirms his power because the truth could only be revealed by seeking him to begin with.
The fact is, The Wiz survives the reveal. He doesn’t disappear. He doesn’t die. He doesn’t lose meaning. He just stops pretending to be limitless.
What if the thing we are most afraid to be seen as—the tiredness, the doubt, the unfinished self, is not evidence of fraudulence but proof of incarnation? What if divinity was never meant to be performed at the expense of flesh, but expressed through it?
The Wiz did not lose his power when the curtain fell. He lost the lie that power requires endlessness.
To be human does not make us less divine. Performing divinity without honoring our own humanity does not protect us from exposure , it only ensures it.
Black women do not lose our brilliance when we stop performing godhood. We lose only the exhaustion of pretending we were never meant to need rest.
And if I’m only human, I know that is always enough.
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