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In sharing our stories, our goal was not to make generalizations about the experiences of graduate student-instructors of color, suggest race is the most important/only dimension to consider, or just show the challenges we face. Instead, we wanted to bring more attention to the additional considerations to the student-instructor dual role that graduate students navigate through the lens of race. Here, we have highlighted two considerations that have been important to us: our feelings of needing to “prove” our legitimacy and fit as writing instructors, given our racialized identity, alongside the emotional labor that we are also navigating that sits partially outside of the purview of both roles of student and instructor. We argue that our examples highlight a kind of additional labor that becomes normalized for racialized people and adds to the complexity of the dual graduate student-instructor identity. This additional labor is tied to not only adjusting to the responsibilities and the white racial habitus that we need to partially embody in graduate school but our lived realities impacting us outside the classroom as well (e.g. Sujash’s immigration process and Matt’s identity building as a mixed-race person in the diaspora). This additional labor will vary across all racialized graduate student-instructors as each of us have unique lived experiences based on the intersections of our identities but we argue that it is necessary to consider how discussions of this labor can fit into graduate curriculum/training to help racialized students navigate their studies, teaching, and livelihoods.