Beyond Reckless Mentoring: (Re)Imagining Cross-Racial Mentor-Mentee Relationships

• In Event: Mentoring While White: Culturally Responsive Practices for Sustaining the Lives of Black College Students

Abstract

Black students experience predominantly white institutions as racist and at odds with their survival and success; meanwhile, white faculty at these institutions are often unprepared to mentor and sustain them (Dorimé-Williams & Choi, 2021; Harris & Lee, 2019; Reddick & Pritchett, 2015).
Mentoring is a form of reciprocal love (Jackson, Sealy-Ruiz, & Watson, 2014), a cyclical co-exchange of mutual enrichment to ensure the individual and collective prosperity of mentor and mentee. Within this guiding definition, this session intersects three women’s experiences of mentoring--African American, African immigrant, and white--to provide a frame for the themes of the symposium.
Through an examination of the presenters’ three autoethnographies from an intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1991), this session captures how faculty--white and otherwise--engage in practices of “reckless mentoring” and describe the damaging effects on Black minds, bodies, and spirits.
In addition, in positioning Black and white experiences of faculty mentorship, the session interrogates the current literature on efforts to recruit, retain, and sustain Black college students. In reconciling the presenters’ experiences, effective mentoring practices are highlighted and explored.
As the first presentation of the symposium, this session provides a rationale and a call for a mentoring of Black students that goes beyond doing no harm and instead, sustains the lives, bodies and spirits of Black students in higher education.

Authors

• Abiola Farinde-Wu, University of Massachusetts - Boston
  Presenting Author

• Melissa Winchell, Bridgewater State University
  Presenting Author

• Bettie Ray Butler, University of North Carolina - Charlotte
  Presenting Author