Building Trust, Fostering Agency, Sharing Power: Interracial Feminist Co-Mentoring as a Strategy for Dismantling White Supremacy in Higher Education

Abstract

Despite institutional claims to value increased racial diversity in higher education, Black women in faculty roles perpetually navigate oppressive cultures across all institutional types. The ability to build and foster mutually beneficial interracial mentoring relationships is vitally important to move beyond performative diversity and build truly inclusive organizations. In this project, we sought to interrogate our own interracial feminist co-mentoring relationship to identify guiding principles for others engaged in these types of relationships. As a Black woman and a white 1 1 In opposition to APA guidelines, we do not capitalize white as a racial category or identity. We do capitalize Black, as a form of “rejecting the standard grammatical norm as a means to acknowledge and reject the grammatical representation of power capitalization brings to the term ‘white’” (Huber, 2010, p. 93). woman, we employed duoethnography to analyze the realities of our interracial mentoring relationship and to develop a conceptual framework of interracial feminist co-mentoring. This study emphasized the transformative opportunities that can occur through experiences of social exchange and reciprocity within interracial feminist co-mentoring relationships. We argue for critical evaluation of existing mentorship models to include (a) a recognition of the historical and contemporary factors that inhibit Black women’s ability to build and foster relationships with white women and (b) explicit ways white women can foster trust within interracial co-mentorships that facilitate true agency and shared power. Through this intentional exploration of our relationship, we make space for true divestment in internalized white supremacy for both Black and white women and movement toward dismantling white supremacy culture in mentoring relationships throughout higher education.