My reason for asking them these questions, as part of my sociology assignment on youth mentorship, is that formal mentorship programs for low-income youth have grown exponentially the past two decades. This growth is grounded in the widely held belief that the attention, exposure and guidance of a nonrelated adult mentor can be a hugely positive force in the self-esteem and upward social mobility of underserved youth.
According to the national mentorship organization MENTOR, 3 million American adults had formal, one-to-one mentoring relationships with young people in 2005 and an additional 44 million adults were seriously considering it. Mentees tend to naturally gravitate toward mentors of their own race, but since White Americans dominate the mentor group, and minority adolescents are overrepresented in the mentee group, many mentees end up with a White mentor.
Since mentorship relationships are, at their very core, inscribed with meanings of authority, wisdom and seniority, and even though many programs have moved away from a top-down “paternal” approach to a horizontal “maternal” model, the programs still tend to present the mentor as a noble “knower” and the mentee as at risk, naive or in need of saving.
Therefore, it is critical to understand how issues of power and social difference play out between them. Because even though not much has been written about failed or damaging mentorship relationships, we know they exist and we can only imagine the role that power and difference play.
None of the college mentors I spoke to believed that their Whiteness made much of a difference. “I don’t think it matters,” one of them told me, “because we’re really comfortable around each other. It’s more a cultural thing.”
“To me, it doesn’t matter at all,” another mentor told me, “but my mentee seems more aware of it. At first, she was very surprised I was White and she still seems more aware of the looks we get on the street,” she continued, “but I’ve had mentors who were very different from me as well, so I don’t think a Black mentor would have made much difference.”
