Mentoring Minorities: Examining Mentoring from a Race and Gender Lens

What do we truly understand about how race and gender intersect to influence mentoring experiences, particularly the experiences of African Americans in higher education? Mentoring is frequently cited as a mechanism to support the success of African-American undergraduates and African-American faculty. For racial minority students, isolation is often a key factor in seeking a mentor. Although a mentor may be a plausible solution, there are other factors that must be examined in order to truly increase the success of African Americans in higher education. For example, how does race and gender affect mentoring relationships? In this paper, I identify and examine mentoring and its characteristics as well as the constructs of race, gender, and intersectionality and in particular how they relate to African-American mentoring relationships in higher education.