Power in the Pause: Benefits of African American Female Mentorship in Higher Education

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

There was a popular hip-hop song by the O’Shea Jackson, also known as Ice Cube, titled “Check Yo Self”. The lyrics of the song reminds listeners to “check yourself before you wreck yourself.” This simple message about self-reflection is a charge that African American women in academia are faced with constantly. The message encourages one to take an authentic self-assessment and how the realities of that assessment may contribute to destructive results. Black women must take a take a transparent look at how they are possibly perceived by others and how that perception may contribute to the credibility and contribution to their respective institutions of higher learning. Undoubtedly this need for self-reflection may seem like a biased burden experienced mainly by African American women, but it is a necessary action that can aid in how they may shape their interactions with others in their role in higher education. This necessary self-reflection takes into consideration the multiple perils that African American women in the United States encounter, which consists of discrimination they experience because of gender, race, and sex (Truehill, 2021).