"The blame lies nowhere and the solution rests in all of us"

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been working in the education field for three months now. While I like to tell myself that the back office work I’m doing is making it possible for our young men to have an education they might not other wise receive, I am reminded at least once a month that what they really need is me. They need me not in the capacity that I currently serve, but as a mentor and a marker of success to surpass. These young men are fortunate enough to see positive black male role models during the school day, but when they leave, I’m afraid the images they see are not reflective of what we want them to be. Once a month, several of the students attend a mentoring meeting at which individuals from companies around Chicago come together for a few hours to help shape the future of the young men. As I sat through this meeting today, I noticed that of the nearly one-hundred corporate representatives, not one of them was a black man: I stood alone as the sole face of one of America’s most controversial groups of people. Though the students have never mentioned a concern for the lack of black male presence at these events it must bother them at least on a subconscious level. How could it not? Today, they walked around from table to table at the career fair and didn’t see one face that looked like theirs. We can preach to the young men that every opportunity is theirs and doors will be open to them, but until they can match a familiar face to a blazed path the messages will be diluted. While I applaud the efforts of the organization that hosts the mentoring program, I hope that one day they will make a more concerted effort to recruit mentors who look like the program participants. Simultaneously, successful black must make it easier for programs, like the aforementioned, to find and provide a platform for them to give back. It is a dual effort; the blame lies nowhere and the solution rests in all of us, we must awaken it.