Black Youth Public Intellectuals: Student-Mentees Narrate Strategies to Improve Their Schools and Advance Social Justice

• In Event: People and Policy: Counternarratives of Challenges and Support

Abstract

This paper examines the components of effective mentoring programs for African American youth and makes the case that mentoring alone is not sufficient enough to disrupt the systemic inequities that marginalized Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) youth face. For mentoring to be impactful, it must be coupled with affinity group exposure. Through our work with African American affinity groups at a predominantly white suburban, we suggest that African American youth are capable of narrating and navigating their mentor-mentee relationships and as such should be positioned as public intellectuals.

Authors

• Dara N. Nix-Stevenson, The Experiential School of Greensboro

• Elbert Jay Hawkins, III, UNCG Moss Street Partnership School