A student messaged me, certain that an assignment I had given was written by AI. I pulled up the file. It was dated 2011, years before anyone had heard of a chatbot. I sent her the screenshot. She still was not sure she believed me.
That kind of questioning has become familiar to me. In a department meeting not long before that, a white colleague joked openly about how much he leans on AI to draft his course materials now, and the room laughed with him. Nobody asked to see his files. Nobody wondered if the work was really his. I sat there doing the math on the difference between his laugh and my screenshot.
Everything I do seems to invite another question. I have had students describe me as having too much personality one semester and as flat and boring the next, teaching the exact same way both times. There is no version of me that reads to a room as simply competent. Competent, and left alone.
That kind of doubt followed me to South Africa last year. I had flown there to lead a training I designed myself, over months, for a room that included doctoral students and more than fifty NGOs. I had been on Zoom calls with the host organization for weeks. I said my name every time. Roblyn Lewter. They wrote it down. They used it in emails.
Then I landed, with my white co-lead beside me. The host's eyes went straight to her. He called her by my name, over and over. When a news outlet showed up to cover the workshop, he grabbed her, not me, and pointed the cameras her way. She was the one who had to stop the moment and correct him: no, you want to talk to Dr. Lewter, she designed this.
I remember my words leaving me. I stood there embarrassed, hurt, and angry, in front of my own students, at an event I had built from nothing.
I am an international psychologist. I have spent a career studying how people form judgments about competence. None of that made the moment hurt less, and it left me thinking about something bigger than one bad afternoon. What happens to a person when this keeps happening, in different rooms, for years?
It is exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not lived it. Some days it genuinely feels like it takes the life out of you. So you adjust. You explain more than you should have to. You bring extra documentation to meetings other people walk into empty-handed. You replay a conversation on the drive home, wondering if you sounded too sharp, too tired, too anything.
Researchers call the wear this creates racial battle fatigue, the cumulative cost of constant vigilance, the body staying alert to scrutiny that never fully turns off. There is also a pattern documented in research on faculty of color that deserves its own name: hypervisible when something goes wrong, invisible when something goes right. The mistake gets noticed immediately. The years of work that came before it get forgotten just as fast. You can build something for a decade and still watch one moment of doubt outweigh all of it in someone else's eyes.
This is not only a personal pattern. Jason Arday, one of the youngest Black professors ever appointed at Cambridge, faced plagiarism allegations this year and resigned amid the scrutiny, even after an earlier investigation into his doctoral work had already found those specific claims did not hold up. I am not weighing in on what he did or did not do. I do not know the full record, and I am not positioned to judge it. What I am pointing at is the pattern underneath the story. When someone's competence is already treated as an open question, an accusation can become more than a single incident. It can become confirmation of what people already suspected, whether or not it holds up under real scrutiny.
Eventually, a harder question shows up. Not, "Was that fair?" but, "Maybe it is me."
That is the moment an outside pattern becomes an inside one. You start doing the scrutinizing yourself before anyone else gets the chance. You start pre-writing your own defense before anyone has accused you of anything.
I want to be clear about something, because I know where this argument usually goes. This is not a request for lower standards. Institutions should hold people accountable. Nobody is asking to be excused from that. I have never once asked to be excused from that.
What I am asking for is smaller, and harder to argue with. Let competence, once it has been proven, count for something the next day. Give people the same room to have an off day that everyone else already gets, without that off day becoming the whole story. Stop treating a person's presence, or their name on their own work, as something that needs to be re-earned every single time they walk into the room.
I still think about that room in South Africa. What stayed with me was not just that a man mistook my colleague for me. It was realizing that my work had been fully believable right up until the moment he could see who had actually done it.
Dr. Roblyn P. Lewter is an international psychologist and faculty member based in Washington, D.C.
