Chapter 9: From “Wash” to Weave: Leadership Mentoring Against Racial Macroaggression

Research on mentoring in K–20 education typically emphasizes interpersonal relationships rather than institutional arrangements and ignores how mentoring networks across race, gender, status, and discipline confront and resist institutional narratives privileging and distancing research productivity over/from purpose, principal investigators over/from participants, and administrative leadership over/from student and faculty leadership. Such trends may stem from the tendency among educators to avoid confrontations with people or events that perpetuate social oppression(s). In higher education, tensions and issues can be subsumed by a politics of respectability (Harris, 2003; Higginbotham, 1993), and masked by the institutional guise of civility (Patton, 2004). Similar observations have been made about K–12 education, which has been characterized as “nice field” (field of study) where people play nice (Ladson-Billings, 1998). We are particularly invested and interested in Black women, and how their lives can be diminished when niceness in education masks legacies of colonialism and racism so as to advance socio-political (academic) death (Mbembe, 2006).