Racialized Credibility

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February 2022. Boston. The sidewalks had turned to glass.

I slipped hard walking around a pond and spent a week in the dark, nursing a concussion with a blanket over my head. I had moved to Boston a year earlier from the Bay Area and I was still adjusting. The cold felt personal. The smiles were tight. Everything seemed harder than it needed to be.

The first show I watched when I could finally look at a screen again was Inventing Anna. I don’t remember choosing it; I had never heard the name Anna Delvey, but there the icon was, glowing at the top of Netflix like a cultural assignment I’d missed. I was supposed to be limiting screen time, but I kept watching.

And then Googling.

And then muttering: She just said she had money, and people…believed her?

It wasn’t just the fashion or the fake wire transfers. It was the fact that this beautiful, young, white woman with a weird accent walked into Manhattan’s elite circles and convinced people she belonged. She stayed in luxury hotels for weeks—weeks—without paying and wasn’t immediately kicked out. She simply didn’t pay. And still, people waited, calmly, expectantly, for the money to materialize.

I couldn’t stop thinking: It must be nice to move through the world with that kind of default credibility.

A few weeks later, The Dropout premiered on Hulu, and I found myself fully obsessed with docuseries about female scammers.

The list goes on. In 2023, Netflix released a two-part documentary, The Search for Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, which chronicled Belle Gibson, the Australian wellness influencer who built a viral brand on the lie that she had cured herself of cancer. This year, Netflix dramatized the same story in Apple Cider Vinegar, turning Gibson’s deception into prestige television. Hulu then gave us Scamanda, the trainwreck tale of Amanda Riley, who faked a cancer diagnosis, raised more than $100,000 from her church, and then spent the money freely.

Their lies weren’t small. These women manipulated trust, money, institutions, and care. And they were believed—until they weren’t.

But even after their scams were revealed, these women were treated with curiosity. Their lives became streaming content. Their motivations, narrative arcs. Their scams, entertainment.

Meanwhile, in 2024, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and a political scientist with decades of experience, was forced to resign after 186 days, “the shortest tenure in university history.” She wasn’t forced to resign because she lied about who she was or fabricated credentials or faked an illness. Gay resigned because she was accused of misattributing a few citations. 

Though she apologized, amended, and made herself available to scrutiny, it didn’t matter. The people who wanted her gone had already decided she didn’t belong. And the ones who might have defended her—the folks who praised her appointment and championed the “representation”—mostly stayed quiet. Her story didn’t become a character study; it became a cautionary tale.

When white women lie, they get podcasts and prestige miniseries. When Black women tell the truth, we get audits, panels, and silence.

There’s a fantasy coating certain strands of white feminism that confidence is the same as competence, and that if you act like you belong, no one will question you. But that fantasy only works if the people around you are already inclined to believe you. Scam culture doesn’t expose the system. It reveals who the system was built to trust.

That trust has always been racialized. The U.S. suspicion toward Black women’s claims has been deftly engineered, perhaps most infamously with the “Welfare Queen” myth that Ronald Reagan wielded to influence public beliefs about who cheats the system. This narrative shaped policy and media framing that made Black women presumptive suspects. We have long been trained to see nonwhite women’s needs and competence as problems to be audited, while white women’s deception is cast as a story worth unraveling. 

Delvey scammed banks and hotels and she was labeled an “It girl.”  Gay earned her way to leading Harvard, and people called her a fraud.

Riley faked cancer for years, raised $100,000, and became the subject of a Hulu docuseries. Meanwhile, Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer and still had to fight for tenure.

Elizabeth Holmes invented medical tech that never worked and got investors, press, and a series starring Amanda Seyfried. And still, Black women in leadership roles are treated as placeholders, as temporary, as suspect.

A white woman can show up with a lie and be trusted. A Black woman can show up with a lifetime of receipts and still be doubted.

I think about this more than I want to. Not because I’m surprised, but because I’ve internalized the logic. I triple-check my facts. I reread every email before I send it. I cite sources even when I don’t need to, just in case someone asks. I don’t move like someone trying to get away with something. I move like someone trying not to be mistaken for a problem.

I was once hired to teach English at an elite prep school in San Francisco. On paper, I was a perfect fit. I had a teaching credential, classroom experience, a bachelor’s in English Literature, and an MFA in Creative Writing. I walked into that job proud of the work I’d done to get there.

And then, after I was hired, an administrator casually told me they had “taken a chance” on me.

I remember nodding, smiling politely, pretending not to hear what the administrator said. A chance? As if my credentials weren’t enough. As if my presence needed justification. What was unspoken didn’t need explaining: Most of my colleagues didn’t have teaching credentials at all. Instead, they had Ivy League degrees, which was apparently proof that they could educate the next generation.

I had training. They had trust.

That’s the part I keep coming back to: the assumption that some people are inherently capable, inherently prepared, inherently trustworthy because of where they went to school, how they talk, how they look. It doesn’t matter what’s on paper. It matters who the institution already believes in.

And once you notice that, it’s hard not to see it everywhere. It’s why Delvey could walk into hotel lobbies and art galas and be welcomed without hesitation. It’s why Gibson could build a global brand on a lie. It’s why Riley could stand at a church pulpit and collect donations with a straight face.

The white woman scammer has become so familiar she’s practically a genre. She fills streaming queues and headlines—not just in true crime adaptations like Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Scamanda, and Bad Vegan, but in binge-worthy fictional series, too. Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia packages the archetype in a small-town dramedy: Georgia Miller (Brianne Howey) is hot, blond, charming, manipulative, and maternal. Throughout the series, she hides crimes, cons neighbors, and spins elaborate lies to protect her children, climb the social ladder, and stay one step ahead of her past—and she is positioned to be forgiven by the audience. We’re even asked to root for her. She’s not just a scammer with a heart of gold. She’s proof that if a white woman lies well enough, we’ll call it love.

My Instagram algorithm obviously knows my taste because I was recently fed a headline about Autumn Bardisa, a 29-year-old woman in Florida who posed as a registered nurse and treated more than 4,000 patients before anyone noticed she didn’t have a license. For more than a year, she was embedded within a functioning hospital system and entrusted with people’s lives. Bardisa’s scam isn’t clever or glamorous; it’s terrifying. And she was able to scam a hospital because the system believed her—until it couldn’t anymore.

I don’t want to be a scammer, but I would like to know what it feels like to be trusted by default. To be seen not as a surprise or an exception, but as expected. And yet, I often feel the weight of pause. Not the kind that gives you room to explain or recover, but the kind that says, Prove it. Again.

Over time, I begin to feel less like a person and more like a hypothesis someone’s still testing. Not a liar. Not an imposter. Just someone who’s been trained to overprepare, overdeliver, overthink because to do anything less risks confirming the quiet suspicion that I never belonged in the first place. I’m middle-aged and exhausted, but I still can’t let up. I don’t know how. Or maybe I just don’t believe I’m allowed to. When I do something,  I need to know immediately if it met expectations or, better yet, exceeded them because if I don’t hear that it was enough, I start to fear that what I’ve offered will be read as failure. Or worse, proof that doubt in my ability was right all along.

I’m not scheming. I’m simply trying to be seen without suspicion. Not exceptional. Not unqualified. Just real, and real enough.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copy edited by Evette Dionne.

Alexis M. Wright is a California native based in Massachusetts. Her lyric essay “Which One is the Lifeline?” (The Common) was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2023. Her work appears in Shenandoah, The Maine Review, and Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You’ve Been Told about Black Women, with an excerpt recognized as a finalist in the 2023 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. She is a Vermont Studio Center fellowship recipient, a former Tin House Reading Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Scholar, and a Bread Loaf Contributor Award recipient. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and teaches writing at The Loft, GrubStreet, and midnight & indigo. You can follow her on Instagram, Bluesky, and check out her official website.‬

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