Historically white institutions (HWIs) subject Black graduate students to anti-Black racism and isolation that necessitates a supportive community and mentorship for survival. This research seeks to broaden formal practices to Sankofa mentoring as beneficial in creating a mechanism of circulative mentorship that enriches current and future Black academics. The authors leave affirmations for Black graduate students to adopt within their tenure at their institutions.
TopIntroduction
In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. You must care. You don’t have to know how many square miles are in Idaho, you don’t need to know what is the chemical makeup of chemistry, or of blood or water. Know what you know and care about the person, care about what you know and care about the person you’re sharing with.”
– Maya Angelou (Angelou, 2015)
Several scholars underscore the importance of mentorship for the retention and graduation of Black graduate students (Blockett et al., 2016; Davis & Livingstone, 2016). Black graduate students face social stresses and constant negative expectations, in addition to being a racial symbol in their department, program, or college. For these reasons, a supportive mentor would be useful for Black graduate students as they navigate an often-harmful space. In this chapter, we posit the need for Sankofa mentorship, which we define as a meaningful, reciprocal relationship grounded in storytelling and shared experiences. Sankofa mentoring provides ancestral wisdom for mentees in pointing them in the right direction of success for their future (Gordon et al., 2009). As we explore the ways Sankofa mentorship manifests in an educational setting, we found it necessary to understand the role that Sankofa mentorship can play in the relationships between current Black students and alumni of the same college within an institution.
We underscore the importance of the connection between current students and alumni of the same institution to sustain efforts of equity and inclusion within a particular context. The exposure a mentor will offer is beneficial to graduate students as students profit from seeing someone who looks like them through the process when mentoring happens along the same race lines (Barker, 2016). Given Black graduate students' long history of exclusion from higher education institutions (Mustaffa, 2017), as well as pervasive community assumptions about their academic ability and competencies, more exposure through mentorship provides opportunities for Black graduate students to engage with individuals of similar experiences while navigating their educational journey.