Mentoring While White

As mentoring practices remain elusive yet essential dimensions of human learning and development across time and space, this book should be required reading for all of us committed to advancing humanizing, opportunity centered communities in education and beyond. During these complex, challenging, stressful, and nebulous times, the authors in this book stress the need for lateral learning in the journey and press toward wholeness. Centering – rather than shying away from – the role, salience, and intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers, writers detail a remarkable range of insights about what it takes to understand and engage in mentoring relationships that push against the status quo. A seamless, conceptually connected set of chapters, this is a book for anyone in the fight with minoritized communities for justice and equity!

-- H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Education, Vanderbilt University

The collective voices in Mentoring While White center the realities and disillusionment that many Black students perpetually confront in their pursuit of higher learning. In the book, race, gender, and power are interrogated within and across mentoring relationships at a time when the taken-for-granted norms of academia are being challenged not only for its silence but also for universities' complicity in the reproduction of racial inequity. Grounded in critical theories of race and emancipatory pedagogies, the authors push readers to contemplate the ways in which culturally responsive mentoring might help mitigate racial injustice inside and outside of higher education. We learn that as Black students resist hegemonic education, they inevitably further the promises of a multiracial democracy. Mentoring and cultivating a Black student are a privilege!

-- Venus E. Evans-Winters PhD, research and policy scholar, African American Policy Forum

Mentoring While White: Culturally Responsive Practices for Sustaining the Lives of Black College Students is essential reading for White faculty and administrators and those engaged in anti-racist initiatives. The text advances our understanding of Black students’ mentoring experiences in higher education and their relationships and engagement with White faculty and administrators. The authors’ critical framing of the chapters illuminates the inappropriateness of a “one size fits all” approach to mentoring college students.

-- Dorian L. McCoy, University of Tennessee, Knoxv