Mentor Diverse People Posted on January 28, 2008 The responsibility of mentors, explains Margaret Beale Spencer (bio), is to nurture the next generation of researchers.

As a person of color and as a woman, I will say that I probably have mentored as many men as I have women. I find it interesting, I find it fascinating because they're different in some ways and similar in other ways.

What I would say is that we need to mentor everyone, diverse people of color and also just diverse individuals period, by gender, class history, or whatever. But I think mentoring is a collective, I think, a job for the entire profession. So I prefer not being viewed as a person that can only mentor a certain type of individual, but I mentor people who are committed to improving the condition of children, youth, and families.

And so we have those values: I'm willing to share. I mean today's, this morning's breakfast session, they were all white women, and I did not have any less to share with them than I would with women of color. And I expect my diverse colleagues who are majority group members to also effectively mentor young people of color. I want men to be as effective in mentoring women and vice versa.

I really feel as if we need to think about mentoring as we feel about parenting. We can't guarantee your having a son or a daughter, right? But we're responsible for doing an effective job with parenting both. I see the very same thing about this field, that we need to mentor everyone who has been admitted to the sorority or the fraternity and do a good job welcoming them and making sure that they can do whatever they want to do and that we're willing to support them because we have to replace ourselves.

The bottom line is that we're not going to be around forever and to leave this field at some point to transition to one's next career or whatever, you want to leave very able people in the academy. And I think that's a responsibility that we have to mentor everyone, irrespective of demographics.

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