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

Mentoring While White: Culturally Responsive Practices for Sustaining the Lives of Black College Students provides a provocative and illuminating account of the mentoring experiences of Black college and university students based on their racialized and marginalized identities. Bettie Ray Butler, Abiola Farinde-Wu, and Melissa Winchell bring together a diverse group of well-respected leading and emerging scholars to present new and compelling arguments pointing to what white faculty should do to reimagine mentoring that seeks to sustain the lives of Black students by way of intentionality, reciprocal love, and transformative practice. This timely and relevant text takes a solution-oriented approach in offering direct guidance, promising strategies, and key insights on how to effectively implement culturally responsive mentoring practices that aim to improve cross-racial mentor-mentee relationships and post-school outcomes for Black students in higher education. It provides clear and immediate recommendations that can inform and positively shape mentoring interactions with Black women, men, and queer undergraduate and graduate students using innovative models that draw upon critical media and antiracist frameworks. The book is a must-read for anyone who currently mentors or desires to mentor Black college and university students.

Table of Contents:
Dedications Foreword Christine Sleeter Part I. Mentoring and Lived Experiences Chapter One: Beyond Reckless Mentoring: (Re) Imagining Cross-racial Mentor-Mentee Relationships Abiola Farinde-Wu, Melissa Winchell, and Bettie Ray Butler Part II. Mentoring and Black College Students Chapter Two: Faculty Mentoring Promotes Sense of Belonging for Black Students at White Colleges: Key Insights from Those Who Really Know Terrell L. Strayhorn Chapter Three: Let's Work: Identifying the Challenges and Opportunities for Mentoring Across Difference Richard J. Reddick, Delando L. Crooks, M. Yvonne Taylor, Tiffany N. Hughes, and Daniel E. Becton Part III. Mentoring and Intersectionality Chapter Four: Critical Race Mentoring: Theory into Practice for Supporting Black Males at Predominantly White Institutions Horace R. Hall and Troy Harden Chapter Five: Exploring Mentoring and Faculty Interactions of Black Women Pursuing Doctoral Degrees Marjorie C. Shavers, Jamilyah Butler, Bettie Ray Butler, and Lisa R. Merri

About the Author :
Bettie Ray Butler, Ph.D., is associate professor of urban education and the Director of the M.Ed. in Urban Education program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Abiola Farinde-Wu, Ph.D., is assistant professor of urban education in the Department of Leadership in Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Melissa Winchell, Ed.D., is associate professor of secondary education and Chair of the Accelerated Post Baccalaureate Program at Bridgewater State University.

Review :
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! 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! 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.