New Research Finds Campus Mentoring Systems Reflect and Reproduce Racial Hierarchies

Foste, Z., & Whitehead, M. A. (2026). Confronting the racialized context of mentoring on campus. About Campus. https://doi.org/10.1177/10864822261430711

Introduction

Mentorship is widely recognized as central to student success, yet access to meaningful mentoring relationships is not equally distributed. Foste and Whitehead (2026) argue that whiteness—the oppressive racial ideology embedded in historically white institutions (HWIs)—structures who gets mentored, by whom, and to what effect. First-generation, Black, Latine, Indigenous, and working-class students face compounding barriers to equitable mentoring.

Methods

The authors draw on critical whiteness studies, higher education scholarship, and personal narrative to build their argument. Two organizing concepts—white space and seduction (drawn from Cynthia Dillard’s work)—provide the theoretical foundation for the analysis.

Results

Whiteness operates at both structural and psychological levels to inhibit mentoring equity. At the institutional level, exclusive campus pathways (honors colleges, leadership programs) concentrate mentoring resources among predominantly white students, while Faculty and Staff of Color, already scarce, bear a disproportionate mentoring load as a result. At the internal level, HWIs enact “seduction”—severing Students of Color from their cultural identities and forcing assimilation—while white students remain underprepared to examine their own racial positioning.

Discussion

The authors argue that race-evasive mentoring actively harms Students of Color by ignoring the psychological toll of white institutional spaces. Drawing on Yosso’s community cultural wealth framework, they call for identity-conscious mentoring that affirms cultural backgrounds and supports healing.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Institutions should diversify faculty and staff, audit access inequities in high-mentoring-density programs, and require professional development in identity-conscious mentoring. White mentors must engage in sustained critical self-reflection rather than performative antiracism.

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