Role Models or Mentors
In April 1990, the esteemed Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell stunned the legal world when he announced he was taking a leave of absence without pay until the law school appointed a tenured Black woman on its faculty. Bell had a well-established track record for championing the need for law schools to end their racist and sexist hiring and retention policies and practices. And now, with his wife Jewel battling cancer, Bell literally put his money where his month was, taking an unpaid leave while calling for Harvard Law School to hire a Black woman who, like him, would be a “role model” to racialized minority students.
While University of Maryland law professor Tauyna Lovell Banks, a Black woman, supported Bell’s protest, she questioned his discourse. In the Berekely Women’s Law Journal, Banks wrote:
The dispute at Harvard Law School over the absence of Black women from the faculty is disturbing. Particularly distressing is the use of the term “role model” as the articulated rationale for hiring a Black woman law professor. The term “role model” seems soft, unlike the word “mentor.” A role model is a person whose “behavior in a particular role is imitated by others.” Most often a “role model” is passive, an image to be emulated. On the other hand, a mentor is more aggressively involved with her protégé. The word “mentor” has an intellectual connotation which the term “role model” generally lacks. Because mentors provide some intellectual guidance, they also must be respected intellectually.
Banks deemed Bell’s talk of role models soft, the kind of linguistic framing that encouraged Black professors to be passive images rather than active agents of institutional change. In contrast, Banks called for Harvard Law School to hire Black women law professors to be mentors—intellectually respected sisters who would aggressively cultivate their students.
I appreciate Banks’ critique. Language matters. We’re linguistic creatures who see, think, and act within and through language. And, to extend something implicit in Banks’ critique, phrases like “role models” and “mentors” carry different connotations in different communities. In historically and predominately white male institutions, racialized minority women “role models” are frequently understood in terms of racist images like “mammies,” unintelligent Black women eager to serve white male masters or leaders. Bell and Banks didn’t call for Harvard Law to hire a mammie; they called for the school to hire a free Black woman who’d help desegregate its faculty and curriculum.
But this brings me to a concern. Although I support Banks substitution of “mentor” for “role model,” I must flag that the term “mentor” carries disturbing connotative freight in historically and predominately white academic institutions. Many white faculty in such schools think of racialized minority faculty mentoring in segregationist and labor-intensive terms. These white faculty imagine a POC faculty member spending countless hours in their office—not study—counseling “struggling” or “disgruntled” POC students. And these white faculty imagine a good, inclusive department and tenure or promotion process as that which acknowledges these “anticipated difficulties.” As we’d say in Spanish: Hay muchos problemas.
Do I have an alternative wording proposal? Yes and no. I don’t think any single-term substitution will do. In racist societies like the US, all functional or evaluative terms carry racist and sexist connotations. This point isn’t new; James Baldwin, for example, bemoaned it for decades. But Baldwin also saw that employing a collection of terms can amplify the non-racist connotations each carries, even if it can’t eradicate the racist ones. Again: Hay muchos problemas.
In a centuries-old quagmire, there are no easy, fail-proof options. There are only complicated and fallible ones.
