I'm not black. I'm a white male. I have five degrees including a PhD from an Ivy League school, I've been published in nature twice, Harvard Business Review, bl

I'm not black. I'm a white male. I have five degrees including a PhD from an Ivy League school, I've been published in nature twice, Harvard Business Review, bla bla bla. All great on paper. But if you meet me in person, you'd never know that. I come across as a person of average intelligence (at best!), and I can tell you that I've always (at least at first) been treated like an outsider in high performing circles. I remember my second year of computer science when we had our first big group assignment, and no one wanted me in their group because they assumed I was a slacker of low average intelligence. Little did they know at the time that I was one of the top programmers in the class. Eventually everyone found out, and you know what, they liked me even more for it. But it's an uphill battle whenever you are different. That said, I'm not walking in your shoes. Maybe it would be the same, or maybe it would be 10x worse or 100x worse. What may help is two pieces of advice: (1) when you're in high performing circles if you don't talk and act like others in your group they'll assume that you're an outsider. Ironically, humans are simply not smart enough to look beyond the first set of superficial data points before they make a decision and so people react according to their experience. It may not be right, but it is. So if you're entering a foreign group and you WANT to be accepted, then you're going to need to act in a way that is familiar to them. (2) Something I heard once from Indra Nooyi: "Always assume positive intent". That is, sometimes people think negatively about us, and sometimes we read into things. If you think that people have good intentions then try to make the second your null hypothesis. Even if you're wrong you may win some of these people over, and when you're right you may give people important benefit of the doubt.