The ‘legging up’ burden: Hidden struggles of model minorities in racialized mentoring at work

Abstract

Drawing on contemporaneous microstoria narrated by Black model minorities (BMMs), this paper theorizes the legging up burden: the implicit expectation that BMMs, positioned as token representatives of their race, will provide mentoring and support to organizational members with whom they share ethnic identities. We show how this burden reveals a central paradox in organizational diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) practices. While mentoring initiatives are framed as mechanisms for redressing inequality, they often obscure the very structural conditions they purport to address by displacing responsibility for change onto minoritized professionals. As a result, organizational power relations remain intact and largely unexamined. Our primary contribution to the diversity literature is the development of the legging up burden as a critical analytic construct that illuminates how identities, racialized expectations, and organizational practices become interwoven to valorise model minorities as symbols of progress while simultaneously compromising their autonomy and authenticity. We further contribute to Black scholarship by demonstrating how inclusion-oriented practices can reproduce tokenism, undermining the promise of meaningful and transformative inclusion.