Torie Weiston-Serdan

The next generation is always society’s most important resource, so it follows that mentoring youth is an important activity. The author Weiston-Serdan leads a non-profit network of youth mentors in Southern California. She encounters situations where mentors have to unpack social baggage that can hold youth back – issues like race, gender, class, and sexuality. These issues are often classified under the label of critical theory, issues where power relationships can exist. Therefore, her message seeks to liberate youth through education that they may choose a beneficial future for themselves. She ultimately hopes to encourage aspirations like attending college to gain practical skills for a better life and to help others.

Weison-Serdan’s aims are certainly in the right direction. Her goals are exactly what is needed and what I hope to accomplish personally when I mentor youth. She identifies the right issues that often hold people back. She rightly points out that the intersectionality of these issues can combine to hold back many individuals. Simply being black or a lesbian is relatively easy to guide. But in reality, most youth encounter multiple issues – being a black lesbian from an impoverished background. Those multiples require more careful parsing of how to deal with life.

This book, however, does seem to have some foundational limitations. It’s very short, and it deals with its topic at a very high level. It labels itself as “practical,” but it contains an abundance of theory. I want to hear more stories and more qualitative data showing how these principles operate. At times, it accomplishes this, but most of the time, it just stays in abstractions. It needs to be double the size (to 230 pages, say) with anonymized stories showing how this works. At that length, it would still not be too long.

After this book has been published in 2017, one of its topics (critical race theory) has entered into most American households. This book does not politicize the issue (as television commentators have since), but rather shows how this thread traces through so many Americans’ experiences. As such, it does provide a good, solid, apolitical introduction to the issue that shows that critical race theory possesses nothing to fear.

This book hopes to hit the market of youth mentors. That’s not a huge market, but there aren’t a ton of books that look at mentoring in depth. The theoretical perspective it offers is needed, but it needs to be supplemented by everyday stories, especially since it’s marketed as “practical.” As this book correctly asserts, mentoring requires some degree of training to avoid a “white savior” syndrome and unhealthy power dynamics. This book can help mentors equip themselves to help their mentees (or “protegés,” in this book’s vocabulary). It’s short and accessible. I’d just like to see less telling and more showing how this theory gets fleshed out.… (mais)