Black Mentorship Against the Antiblack Machinery of the University

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

Abstract

This presentation is grounded in a recognition of anti-Black structures in academia that, among other things, always already imagine mentors and mentees as white and that position Black students in a space of precarious reliance on the mentor for access to the racialized cultural and intellectual norms of higher education. This session explores a mentorship of Black students that does not provide strategies and tactics necessary to merely survive the academy and instead identifies and eliminates the policies and practices that necessitate these survival tactics (Love, 2019).
The co-presenters of this session draw on their own interracial mentoring relationship--the mentor is white, the mentee Black--and their individual efforts to mentor Black students to explore practices that they have engaged in and experienced that were beneficial. It examines ways that white faculty mentors can actively work against the anti-Black machinery in the university by reframing interracial mentorship as Black mentorship. Black mentorship takes as its starting point Dumas’s (2014) notion of black suffering. Cornel West (see Taylor, 2008) suggests that this suffering, or what he calls “catastrophe,” is a space of truth in the Adornoian (2003) sense that “the need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth” (p. 17). Thus, this session examines the mentorship of black students as a space for truth-telling coming out of social suffering mediated by schooling.
For example, the session explores how white anti-racist mentors can recognize the limits of their own knowledge and abilities, use silliness and laughter to disrupt white supremacy, and develop a shared distrust of the institution. As historian and Black Studies scholar Robin D.G. Kelley (2018) identifies, this work necessitates a symbiotic praxis blending continued self-education and dogged persistence.

Authors

• Timothy J. Lensmire, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College
  Presenting Author