The Pain We Inherit and the Harm We Pass on: Rethinking Mentorship Through a Holistic Critical Lens

I have spent my life inside programs that told me I was capable and worthy, and I have also spent years quietly carrying the cost of that belonging. Dominant mentorship discourse in higher education tends to construct mentors as either good or bad, helpful or harmful. This paper challenges that binary by examining the insidious harms within well-intentioned mentoring relationships, particularly in programs serving historically excluded populations. Using community-based participatory research and critical narrative inquiry, this study centers the voices of 35 participants across the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) McNair community, including current scholars, alumni, staff, and Friends of McNair. Participants described mentoring that was simultaneously transformative and harmful, revealing how power, race, and institutional pressure shape even the most caring relational encounters. Grounded in Holistic Critical Mentoring (HCM), a framework integrating Critical Race Theory, Community Cultural Wealth, Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology, and Critical Pedagogy, this paper interrogates how mentors can become complicit in institutional harm when operating without critical reflexivity. Autoethnographic reflection, grounded in my own formation as a McNair Scholar, a Meyerhoff Scholar, and a Baltimore native who taught mathematics in the city’s public schools, surfaces my own contradictions as a director who has at times reproduced the very norms I sought to dismantle. Harm frequently manifested through the policing of attire and language, pressure to suppress cultural or spiritual identity, and expectations to perform resilience without care. This paper positions mentorship as a relational and systemic practice capable of both reproducing oppression and enacting repair.