Devil Was Never Who They Said It Was: Poetic Inquiry, Mentorship, and the Violence of Institutional Care

• In Event: “Bad Mentor”: Community Perceptions of “Qualified” Mentors in the Tower and the Block

Abstract

They promised mentorship would ground me. Instead, it wore a halo—wrapped in care, but hollow. My poem Devil Was Never Who They Said It Was holds that rupture: a lyrical excavation of how care can mask embedded control. I position my work within Black feminist thought (hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984), critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017), and scholarship on Black men’s racial trauma (Cooper, 2024), arguing that white dominant institutional mentorship harbors covert violence. Using poetic inquiry (Cutts & Waters, 2019; Prendergast, 2009), I treat the poem as both method and insight—interrogating how affirmations like “you matter” can discipline the “performative” scholar of color.

Author

• Darius Phelps, Cuny