Mentors and Role Models: Masculinity and the educational 'underachievement' of young Afro-Caribbean males

In September 1999, the British Government embarked on its 33 million mentoring programme. Learning mentors have been awarded the task of helping secondary pupils to overcome barriers to individual learning. These measures coincide with increasing calls within the black community and among anti-feminist male activists for the provision of male role models to remedy the current underachievement of male students. In New Labour's educational discourse, gender and racial inequality are defined as problems of ineffectiveness, standards and performance. For anti-feminist male activists, the prevalence of female teachers, 'soft' pedagogic practices and matriarchal families are the prime cause for the underachievement of boys. Neither discourse recognises the dynamic and relational properties of gender and the complex, contradictory relations between discourses of masculine and feminine identity. More insidiously, both discourses provide conditions for the promotion and legitimation of hegemonic forms of masculine identity. Writers have variously identified how misogyny and homophobia are often deployed in the construction of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities. Part of the problem resides with a lack of socially informed research providing critical analysis of mentoring practices and the forms of masculine subjectivity which are their condition and outcome. Conversely, this article examines the socio-historical, political and cultural processes involved in the interplay between mentoring, ethnicity and the production of masculine identities.