“Wait, Could I Be Gifted?” Self-Inventory
First, a preamble…
There are countless reasons why a gifted person might not be identified as "gifted" early in life—
❓ maybe their school didn't have the resources to identify them
❓ maybe giftedness was understood in ways that weren't expansive enough
(e.g., that it's only about IQ and academic performance)
❓ maybe racism and/or other social forces undermined their identification
❓ maybe a concurrent disability or other illness masked their giftedness
❓ maybe a family member who was aware of their identification hid it
❓ or maybe there was no concept of giftedness where they grew up
Whatever the reason, not knowing this about yourself can hurt you, and becoming aware of their giftedness later in life has been life changing for many gifted people.
Why?
Giftedness isn't just a childhood phenomenon but rather denotes enduring atypicality in thought processes, emotional processing, motivation, relationships, and more.
This atypical way of being gives rise to various unique opportunities, but they often accompany significant challenges.
Learning that you're gifted can help demystify challenges that have followed you your entire life ... and help you chart a new way forward!
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Before you start, know that this self-inventory does not offer:
❌ a numerical representation of intelligence such as IQ
❌ a result that rates your abilities on a scale or plots them on a continuum
❌ engagement with past experiences of developmental significance
❌ a definitive appraisal of the inner workings of your mind or trajectory
❌ a focus on many aspects of giftedness that extend beyond mental capacities (e.g., kinaesthetic, spiritual, naturalist, etc)
This self-inventory does offer:
✅ an entry point for self-discovery about the potential role of giftedness in your life
✅ insights based on how you represent your subjective experience of your thought processes, emotional processing, behaviors, and relationships from multiple predefined options
✅ self-inventory options based on understandings of giftedness outlined in literature that is widely used in the gifted support field as of 2024
Sound good?
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Self-Inventory Begins Here
Assessing the potential role of giftedness in your life is not an exact science. This self-inventory does not assign a particular number of “points” to particular answers. However, answers that track with contemporary understandings of giftedness as outlined in current gifted support literature are highlighted below. Use this self-inventory to learn more about yourself and those around you, irrespective of the potential role of giftedness in your life!
How do you experience your own mental processing compared to others?
Faster than most people when information is delivered in the right way (e.g., I have traits associated with AuDHD, dyslexia, or another disability). 🌀
[ ✅ Consider giftedness + twice-exceptionality ]So much faster than most other people that I am regularly asked to simplify my thoughts and break things down into smaller nuggets. 😅
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]So fast, complex, creative, non-linear, and imbued with intuitive insights and knowledge drawn from multiple disparate domains. This means that translating my actual trains of thought to most others is often impossible. 🤷🏽♂️
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]I haven't noticed anything unusual about my mental processing that aligns with the options above. ⭐
How would you describe your level of independent curiosity?
I'm not especially curious when left to my own devices and prefer to take things as they come. 😊
I'm independently curious about all kinds of things but not so much that it makes me feel weird or elicits strange looks from others. 📚
I'm very curious and my enthusiasm for inquiry makes life hard sometimes (e.g., in communication; conflict and rejection in relationships; my inner emotional state; and professional life).🕵🏽♂️
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]I'm extremely curious and my unceasing immersion in the world of ideas—including abstraction, metaphor, and paradox—creates constant challenges for me (e.g., in communication; conflict and rejection in relationships; my inner emotional state; and professional life). 🧨
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
How would you describe the intensity with which you pursue things you care about?
I'm pretty laid back most of the time and don't like to take anything I'm doing too seriously. 😎
I get lost in my activities sometimes but not so much that it makes me feel unusual. 🤷🏽♀️ 🌈
I sometimes become so consumed with my projects and/or vision that I become inattentive to things on a level that's led other people to comment on it. 🌪️ ⁉️
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]When I do something I really care about, I go FULL THROTTLE 🔥 with high energy and it often shocks or perplexes other people. 👀
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
How would you describe your emotional processing compared to other people?
In addition to processing things deeply on an intellectual level, my emotional processing is also very deep (e.g., being moved to tears and action by beauty and/or information, concepts, and events that speak to my values and sense of justice... even if others ignore these things. 💗
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]Experiences connected to my emotional landscape are often so profound that they engulf my entire being and serve as a source of broader insight beyond the self (e.g., empathic knowledge of others' inner states and/or sources of significant artistic inspiration, and inspiration to take massive social action).💡
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]I haven't noticed anything unusual about my emotional reactions that aligns with the options above. 😊
How would you gauge the originality of your ideas?
My ideas aren't too out there. I usually stick to the tried and true as well as the best practices of those who have come before me. I don't generally relate to the people who want to leap far ahead into the future or go off in a bunch of uncharted directions (even on the inside). 💼
I have a lot of creative, original ideas that I share with others, but they are usually not so out there that they create major confusion, disbelief, or elicit hostile reactions from peers. 🎨
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]My ideas tend to be highly unconventional and/or radical as they arise from my own unique combination of experience and expansive self-directed study. Many people can't relate to my visionary ideas and I consistently receive polarized reactions. 🚀
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
How expansive and intense are your interests?
I like to dabble in various things but don't take any of them too seriously. 😎
I naturally ZERO IN on one thing within my "zone of genius" and forge ahead without feeling the pull of another calling or interest. 🎯
I am interested in tons of things and love to dive into all of them but don't necessarily discern an underlying logic that connects it all.💡
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]My interests are vast, my strengths span a bunch of areas, and it's all connected (even if a lot of people don't see the connections). 💫
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
How do you relate to questions of justice and fairness?
My values are pretty straightforward and I live up to them without too much difficulty. I do what I can within existing systems and networks to make a difference but don't get too carried away or allow myself to alienate people in the process. 💖
I am deeply committed to my values and have put everything on the line many times to stand up for them, often eliciting perplexed and even hostile reactions from people who are threatened by what I stand for. ⚖️
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]My values are important to me but my attitudes on specific questions are highly mutable, constantly evolving, and suffused with an awareness of (non-)duality and paradox. 🌀
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
What kind of social dynamics do you experience?
I tend to fit in and find rewarding social connections in most places without much effort or attempting to hide major parts of myself. 😎
It's consistently difficult for me to find peer relationships that are genuinely meaningful and I often find myself feeling pressure to hide major parts of myself or risk being told I'm overwhelming people or simply "too much" (e.g., too intellectual, sensitive, idealistic, perfectionistic, and/or emotional). 😅
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
To what extent do you derive insight from spiritual or intuitive sources?
I don't consciously derive much knowledge or creative inspiration from my own spiritual, cosmic, and/or intuitive experiences. 🌎
I often derive knowledge and/or inspiration from spiritual, otherworldly experiences that have a significant impact on my life experience. 🧘🏾♀️
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]I have psychic and/or mystical experiences that constitute central sources of knowledge in my life and provide visionary insights that exceed the ordinary. ✨
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
How do questions of meaning, purpose, integrity, and authenticity shape your life experience?
I've been living the same life for many years (e.g., same social circle, hobbies, and professional pursuits) ...and I wouldn't say that I've ever really experienced much inner turmoil related to the ultimate meaning and purpose of it all. I also haven't experienced major internal dilemmas that have led me to worry that I've deviated from my authentic self or violated my sense of personal integrity in a fundamental way. 🌟
Questions of meaning, purpose, and integrity propel my life so much that I have experienced major upheavals in my self-concept, social circle, and/or career that may have been met with great concern from others (and even myself). Maintaining personal authenticity and integrity with my inner value system is a north star in my life in ways that it doesn't seem to be for most people around me. 🤷🏽
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
What role does existential reflection play in your life?
I wouldn't say that I worry too much about existential questions like the meaning of life, death, love, beauty, the nature of reality, or the nature of evil and suffering. Live in the moment, man! 😎
I find myself being drawn to existential questions sometimes but it's not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about most days. 😊
My conscious and sustained engagement with existential themes plays a significant role in my life experience and has been a constant presence in my life from the time that I was young. 🌱
[ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
Though giftedness is so much more than what IQ tests measure, note if your IQ has been measured at 130 or higher:
Yes [ ✅ Consider giftedness ]
No / Not Sure
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That’s it!
If your self-inventory process has piqued your interest in giftedness as a phenomenon and its potential role in your life, explore some of my resources on the subject here. These include my 45-page guide, Tasting the Gifted Rainbow.
The Gifted Person’s Bill of Rights
I have the right...
⭐ To choose spaces that can handle my intensity.
⭐ To rely on my own discernment about when, where, and under what circumstances I will use particular gifts.
⭐ To move at my own pace and along my own self-styled path (e.g., lightning fast, painstakingly slow, and so non-linearly that it appears I'm standing still).
⭐ To deviate from others' expectations surrounding what it means to live up to my potential and, instead, opt to express my giftedness in my own idiosyncratic way.
⭐ To desire and receive emotional support, including addressing the trauma I have experienced as a result of how my intelligence is perceived by other people.
⭐ To exist and define myself apart from other people's projections, fears, and emotional needs.
⭐ To exist in ways that challenge others' beliefs and entitlements related to people with my background and/or identities.
⭐ To rest, play, experiment, and revel in unproductive exploration that feeds my soul just because I want to.
⭐ To meet my particular needs for stimulation (e.g., intellectual) even when others view this negatively.
⭐ To shine brightly rather than dim myself to protect others from feelings of inadequacy that my light stirs up in them.
⭐ To disappoint, confuse, and otherwise disconnect from people whose expectations or demands are misaligned.
⭐ To honor my sensitivities and vulnerabilities by choosing relationships, activities, and settings that work for me.
* Crowdsourced from the Our Wild Minds Community.
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To get a beautiful, printable version of this list and a boatload of other resources about giftedness, grab my 45-page guide, Tasting the Gifted Rainbow!
The Gifted Rainbow in Sociocultural Context
Psychology and other scientific fields are not neutral repositories of knowledge but have been unduly shaped by various forces including the social and political.
This has implications for how we understand giftedness and how gifted individuals who occupy different social locations experience giftedness.
Below are 5 key themes to consider:
⭐ Race
In the western world, racist rhetoric has had a significant impact on how the intelligence of members of various racial groups have been understood. For example, blackness was formally and falsely associated with lower intelligence in the work of Lewis Terman, a founding father of gifted education, who helped to popularize the IQ test. Black individuals who exhibit intellectual giftedness thus face significant additional challenges including being chronically disbelieved, ignored, and perceived as inherently inauthentic or pathological. Due to the myth of the model minority and other forces, many gifted Asian Americans may be subjected to expectations of academic excellence that conflict with their individual constellation of gifts (e.g., emotional, spiritual, kinaesthetic).
⭐ Nation + Migration
Race and parallel social signifiers do not have single, stable meanings across place and time. Thus, gifted Black people who hail from different parts of the diaspora and/or whose families have undertaken recent migratory journeys have life experiences imbued with particularity that exceeds the category of race. Attending to different histories of colonization, enslavement, and war as well as contemporary differences in sociocultural landscapes are critical ingredients for deepening both self-knowledge and insight into the gifted journeys of people shaped by other national contexts.
⭐ Gender
The gender roles and related assumptions that prevail in a society have a significant impact on many gifted people’s experiences. For example, a common challenge that gifted women face is exuding intellectualism, leadership ability, and intensity that conflict with the longstanding patriarchal contract within which women are expected to function primarily as receptive, subordinate sidekicks to men. This has led to women’s intellectual curiosity being overtly labeled pathological in the past. A common challenge for gifted men is exhibiting greater sensitivity than the average man that may undermine his ability and/or willingness to perform stereotypical forms of masculinity. Gender-related norms have the potential to challenge all gifted people, though with different consequences according to positionality.
⭐ Class
Class or socioeconomic background can have a significant impact on an individual’s experience of giftedness. In working-class communities, for example, an individual who exhibits an unusually large vocabulary, unusual interests that arise from solo learning, and atypically high aspirations may be seen as highfalutin, insubordinate, rejecting of one’s roots, and even anti-egalitarian. For gifted people from wealthy backgrounds, their gifts (e.g., greater emotional + intuitive activation) can lead them down paths that elicit resistance from their families and communities.
⭐ Indigeneity, Colonization + Spirituality
Among the multiple impacts of settler colonial violence, genocide, and dispossession on Indigenous peoples, one that is not always highlighted is the violent imposition of colonial metaphysical systems—one key mode of domination that is relevant to how we understand and identify the presence of intelligence and (in)sanity. Some individuals within (and beyond) Indigenous and colonized communities may inhabit worlds characterized by different metaphysical presumptions than those that prevail in Western science (e.g., divergent understandings of the nature of reality; the processes through which knowledge arises and its sources; and the origins and ultimate fate of humanity and the universe). Though some people may recognize divergent attitudes in these areas as manifestations of spiritual giftedness or cultural differences, other people may conceptualize such orientations as evidence of mental illness. Thus, the manner in which we come to understand intelligence, giftedness, and the difference between mental illness and revelation cannot be understood outside the context of social history, and the broader struggles that shape the production and marginalization of knowledge itself.
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To get a beautiful, printable version of this complete with citations and a boatload of other resources, grab a copy of my 45-page guide, Tasting the Gifted Rainbow!
10 Tips for Gifted Allies
Whether you identify as gifted or not, you almost definitely have people in your life who are gifted. If you’re curious about how you can be a better ally to these neurodivergent individuals, consider these 9 tips:
Own Your Shadow
Gifted people often find that their way of being elicits accusations of hostility, arrogance, and attempts at outshining others just for being themselves. Tackling one’s emotional wounds, insecurities, and prejudices is not work that is accomplished in a one-time moment of revelation, however. An ongoing commitment to confronting yourself and identifying where you can grow emotionally is key.Get Excited About YOU
It can be hard to hold space for another’s flourishing when we don’t feel truly good about ourselves. Spend time identifying your unique strengths and what makes you feel good about yourself. If you’d like to have more items on this list, consider areas where you might embrace greater personal authenticity and detach from who you think the world needs you to be.Grasp Multiplicity
Gifted people differ substantially from one another and, like anyone, possess both strengths and weaknesses. For example, high intellectual ability does not always co-occur with high emotional intelligence. Approach gifted people as individuals, allowing for them to co-exist with you as complex humans rather than pedestalizing or pathologizing them.Lead With Curiosity
It is not your job to “figure someone out” or profess knowledge of their inner experience when you or others feel bewildered by them. When you don’t know something that you need to know about a person, simply ask them. Static frameworks drawn from the field of “cultural competency” fail when they turn individuals into objects of expertise rather than humans whose unique presence can broaden your understanding of the world and its many inhabitants.Name Your Needs
Would you benefit from an individual presenting information differently (e.g., more slowly, broken into parts, or using different language)? If so, simply say this. Assuming that someone uses large words or a more complicated sentence structure because they are being haughty or evasive is often incorrect. What you may have encountered is a gifted person who is just trying to express their thoughts in a way that feels natural and accurate to them. In other words, it likely has nothing to do with you!Articulate Your Limits
If you are engaging with a gifted person whose standards seem way too high for you to meet, honor yourself and the relationship by owning your experience, naming the misalignment, and communicating your limits.Redefine Worth
Many gifted people feel objectified by others who see their gifts as raw material to mine in the service of societal progress, wealth, or even to bolster their own self-esteem. Realize that the gifted person’s worth is unrelated to their willingness or ability to use their gifts to satisfy others’ visions, expectations, and needs. Life is never wasted.Rethink Reality
A gifted person’s speed of processing or other atypical ability isn’t a deception, joke, or magic trick. If you see someone exhibiting abilities that shock or confound you, though you may feel awe or disbelief, try to exude humanizing regard and compassionate curiosity. Further, consider whether you need to broaden your understanding of reality to account for what you are learning through the humans you encounter.Recognize + Use Your Positionality
Do you operate in contexts in which you can help make room for someone, name an unspoken truth that can drive inclusivity, or ask a clarifying question that can foster mutual understanding? Be on the lookout for these opportunities and cultivate the courage to seize them.Share What You Know
Consider what you can do to raise awareness about the gifted rainbow including sharing this resource. Are there people in your circle who could benefit from reading it?
*This resource was inspired by an Our Wild Minds Community brainstorm.
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To get a beautiful, printable version of this complete with citations and a boatload of other resources, grab a copy of my 45-page guide, Tasting the Gifted Rainbow!
(Young) Gifted and Black Revisited: Why Black Giftedness Still Matters Despite its Complex History
“Young, gifted and black
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean”
—Nina Simone, “Young, Gifted, and Black”
Inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s autobiographical play “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” singer Nina Simone released her song “Young, Gifted, and Black” in 1969. First performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, the song became an anthem of the Black Power movement. The track was taken up and reinterpreted by artists ranging from Donny Hathaway to Aretha Franklin and, as it permeated collective consciousness, gave expression to something that dearly needed to be articulated: that Black youth ought to know that they are wellsprings of intelligence and capability, even when the world around them denies this.
In the late 1960s and 70s when this song hit the airwaves, this capacious use of the word “gifted” was a crucial intervention into discourse. About sixty years prior, psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman popularized the concept of IQ (or “intelligence quotient”) as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ Test—the traditional basis for admission to gifted programs in schools. Terman’s framework measured intelligence in highly reductive ways that did not adequately account for the multidimensionality of intelligence nor control for a host of contextual factors. In his book The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman leveraged his test to argue that Black, Mexican, and Indigenous people were intellectually inferior to whites—a mode of explanation that was subsequently taken up by policymakers toward a number of destructive ends, including advancing forced sterilization policies that targeted people of color and the disabled.
Despite its stark limitations, IQ has endured as a legitimate measure of intelligence in the fields of psychology and education. IQ has also been invoked to explain a whole host of social phenomena, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life being one prominent example. Reviving aspects of Terman’s project inaugurated nearly a century earlier, their book posited that there is an intrinsic, genetic relationship between race and intelligence as measured by the IQ test. Though subsequently challenged in Stephen Jay Gould’s landmark book The Mismeasure of Man and elsewhere, IQ remains a widely-deployed measure of intelligence—shaping educational policy, institutional programming, and people’s self-perceptions in ways that have been limiting at best and extraordinarily harmful at worst. In schools, it remains the primary measure used to admit students to gifted programs.
So How is “Giftedness” Defined, Exactly?
Children have traditionally been labeled gifted if their IQ is measured at 130 or higher, but for the reasons noted above and more, this is an insufficient measure. IQ fails to capture a whole host of inner capacities central to intelligence including creativity and divergent thinking.
Traits traditionally associated with giftedness include:
Specific academic aptitudes
Rapid learning
Creative and productive thinking
High academic achievement
Superior proficiency in one of more domains (including academic, artistic, interpersonal)
But this standard definition of giftedness continues to be challenged by experts in the field, particularly where academic achievement is concerned. Many of the children most capable of creative, divergent, and independent thought are bored by the pace and level of instruction that offers the average learner sufficient stimulation. As such, many of those students experience demotivation in the academic context, do not become top performers in school, and are not identified as gifted despite having inner needs that track with emerging conceptions of giftedness.
Uncoupling the gifted experience from the limiting framework of academic performance, psychologist Mary-Elaine Jacobsen is one of the figures complicating how giftedness is conceptualized. She identifies a number of additional distinguishing traits of gifted people in her book The Gifted Adult including:
Uncommon levels of intensity, complexity, and drive
Heightened perceptual abilities
Elevated awareness of discrepancies between how things are and how they ought to be
A profound need to live authentically coupled with more rapid inner evolution
A profound need to make a broad social impact
Additional conceptions of intelligence have arisen in recent decades to complicate the simplistic picture of ability that IQ posits. One of them is developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s notion of multiple intelligences which defines nine different domains of intelligence (i.e., verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial-visual, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, and existential).
The growing awareness of Gardner’s model has helped to reshape programming in many educational settings as well as many people’s perceptions of their own strengths (e.g., from someone with an “average” IQ to someone who exhibits elevated musical and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as a high-performing athlete). It must be noted, however, that the multiple intelligences that every human exhibits are distinct from the intensity, complexity, and drive that Jacobsen pinpoints. She argues this latter group of traits manifest as a multiplier effect, lending unique shape to an individual’s expressions of intelligence across the nine areas that Gardner enumerates.
From Jacobsen’s vantage point as a researcher and clinician, it is the presence of atypical levels of intensity, complexity, and drive in the expression of one’s intelligences that denotes a gifted person. It must be said that giftedness as it is defined here does not imply superiority, but rather a persistent and incontrovertible set of needs—in this case, for both authentic expression and appropriate stimulation. In Toward a Psychology of Being, psychologist Abraham Maslow famously wrote: “People with intelligence must use their intelligence… Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs.”
In other words, we are all driven by the urge to meet our needs, and the people to whom we apply this label “gifted” have needs that are substantially different from the norm. Just as students enrolled in special education present with their own constellations of needs, so too do students (and adults) who exhibit giftedness. Unfortunately, one of the most significant barriers to meeting these needs is that so many people who exhibit gifted traits are never identified.
Giftedness in Schools and Beyond
Despite the emergence of these more expansive definitions and frameworks for identifying atypical ability, barriers to identification endure, especially for many children of color.
Recent federal data reveals that white children in the U.S. comprise nearly 60% of the students participating in gifted education despite comprising 50% of the overall student population. Meanwhile, Black students made up only 9% of students participating in gifted education despite accounting for 15% of the overall student population. For many people, such statistics are evidence of the enduring mismeasurement of Black intelligence, and cast doubt on the sheer notion of giftedness and its measurability. Meanwhile, questions have arisen in some schools surrounding the efficacy of gifted programming while others have identified gifted programming as one more component of prejudicial tracking systems that sort students into remedial, standard, and advanced tracks and ultimately drive inequity. These and other concerns have prompted some school districts to dispense with gifted programming altogether and begin piloting educational approaches that do not attend to the needs of gifted students specifically.
Though these conversations surrounding educational policy are of vital importance, my aim here is to disentangle them from what I consider to be a separate, and perhaps more fundamental, task. This task is grasping that giftedness—however complicated its emergence as a concept and our attempts to measure it—is a real phenomenon that profoundly shapes people’s life experiences and most fundamental needs within and beyond the classroom throughout the lifespan.
Conversations about giftedness that foreground its academic manifestations have left a number of crucial questions largely unexplored—among them, the significance of giftedness as a core dimension of one’s being that presents specific challenges and opportunities in every area of one’s life (e.g., physical, social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, etc). Seen through this prism, it becomes evident that the battles raging over gifted education represent only one component of a larger challenge to grasp the vastness of human neurodiversity and how to meet the wide array of needs that come along with that diversity.
Various thought leaders and organizations in the gifted space are pioneering crucial work in this area, reappropriating the insights of educational psychology to the broader task of elaborating gifted psychologies that extend across the lifespan and offering direct support. Among their aims is correcting the misguided notion that once a gifted child grows up, they will inevitably become an eminent superstar unburdened of the challenges that accompany uncommon ability in childhood. Irrespective of one’s outer signifiers of success, gifted adults navigate the world with atypical machinery that demands targeted, skillful support from others who can mirror their multitudes. The specific multitudes contained in the experiences of Black gifted adults have not been widely elaborated.
Adult, Gifted and Black
Black adults who are gifted face a unique constellation of challenges in the world. These include being someone who, simply by existing, thwarts racist conceptions of Black people that remain pervasive: namely that we are merely fleshly beings without interiority and high intellectual capacity. To depart from this script as a Black person is to elicit confusion, derision, disbelief, amusement, suspicion, pathologization, and even rapt fascination—all of them dehumanizing. These demoralizing, disorienting experiences—particularly when recurrent—induce trauma responses that induce numbness and hopelessness, promoting alienation from oneself and the world.
These expectations are reinforced by educators and mental health professionals who are often ill-equipped to encounter and support the Black people they serve on their own terms. To complicate matters further, the notion that Black people do not naturally exhibit intellectual giftedness—and that they are being disingenuous when they do—is sometimes reinforced by Black people themselves. Due to various factors including the racist history of intelligence testing and tracking that has already been elucidated here, there are some Black people who associate shows of intellectualism (including academic achievement and high verbal dexterity) with white people or, if a Black person is doing it, a misguided attempt to “act white” and gain the favor of white people through an act of deception.
Thought leaders in the gifted space often write about the social-emotional consequences of gifted people experiencing a lack of mirroring in their social interactions due to an underlying difference in the level of complexity that structures a gifted person’s life experience and the resulting challenge of having to “translate” the contents to someone without acknowledging that translation is occurring. For gifted Black people, this difficulty and barriers to mirroring is on an altogether different level, and it confronts us from multiple directions.
But the task of finding support has remained difficult. Though Black people on the whole are increasingly turning to psychotherapists for support, mental health practitioners are not generally trained to work with giftedness and often pathologize its manifestations out of ignorance. There are very few therapists who specialize in work with gifted client populations and, as of this writing, this author is not aware of even one such therapist who identifies as both gifted and Black in the U.S. Another challenge is that therapists, coaches, and others in the gifted space are overwhelmingly white and may exhibit an insufficient grasp of a number of important issues relevant to gifted Black experiences. These include the significance of racism in the lives of gifted Black people, the manner in which racism has shaped conceptions of giftedness itself, and the potential to fundamentally misunderstand the Black client’s interior experience. Any of these can lead to unhelpful or damaging experiences that are burdensome rather than supportive for the client.
For these reasons and others not enumerated here, gifted Black people need to have spaces of support that are Black-led and attend to the specific constellation of social and psychological factors that imbue our worlds with unique challenges and possibilities.
Further resources + support
Though I am no longer offering what was previously known as the Our Wild Minds Community for this demographic as of August 2025, there is a growing network of community spaces and practitioners that gifted Black adults can consult for support. Find a listing of these resources here!
In addition, you can also access my free resources capturing intersectional perspectives on giftedness and relevant support professionals here.
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To get a beautiful, printable PDF filled with a boatload of gifted-related resources, grab a copy of my 45-page guide, Tasting the Gifted Rainbow!