Girls and Young Womem Need Mentoring too

Dear friends,

We constantly hear talk about both African American boys and young men needing mentors. In fact, there have been various degrees of attempts to bring grown men, especially African American ones, into contact with Our male youth.

Yet African American girls, as well as young women, need mentoring too. After all, there are far more females than males, of every ethnic and cultural group, who are interested in contributing to their communities, Our society, and the world. Unfortunately, too often, beginning at an early age, instead of developing a "sense of self", these same young women just mentioned are deliberately distracted by the exploitative and oppressive notion of Male Supremacy/sexism that their real purpose in life should be to get married and start a family.

To be sure, only females can bear children. And the experience of building a family and raising your children to adulthood can be rewarding beyond words. However, although you would never be able to tell by the way that most American families are structured, your children are not your property; rather, they are your legacy. Therefore, with the intention of raising your children, from the very outset, in a way that allows them to become their own parents one day, also makes it possible for the elder parent(s) to continue a meaningful life outside of raising children, so that s/he/they can continue to constantly try to become fully human, by physically, intellectually, and spiritually engaging with his and/or her inner powers, until death. This will also make the aforementioned elder parents the most valuable resource for their adult children, whenever the latter need advice.

But then, of course, within the context of mentoring there is the ever present problem of female self-hatred, the other half of Male Supremacy. That is, just as "racial" self-hatred is the other half of White Supremacy/racism all females are constantly made to internalize their oppression by way of the schools, churches, and mainstream media, to name a few.

What is worse, is the unfortunate reality that this affects the way that older women interact with their younger counterparts, especially with professional women whether in academia or the private sector. On a side note, it also points to how paradoxical Male Supremacy can be, since it rewards psychotics like Bradley Manning and his ilk who claim to be "a woman living inside of a man's body", when none of these very sick, sexist men have even the slightest notion of what it is like to be a little girl who grows up to be a woman in this Male Supremacist world.

In any case, let's now imagine that the same young women and girls mentioned earlier had been mentored by both older women and men for years, not just in their private lives, but in their academic and work lives as well. Additionally, what if the mentors themselves were people who have a genuine interest in seeing all children grow up to be independent but cooperative, thinking yet imaginative, competent, and caring adults?

Do you think that the females of any particular community who have had years of being mentored, and not simply by one individual but many people, would then not only mentor their younger sisters and brothers, but as well teach their charges how to prepare to replace them, while planning for the future for those who have yet to come?

In building genuine communities, as opposed to simply creating more consumers for "the market", at least to me, it is essential that we begin to embrace value judgments that will allow all of Our youth to be able to set goals for the future and for the future of Our communities. One love!

G. Djata Bumpus