Black Boys Like Me // Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging

"Black Boys Like Me ignited parts of me I honestly didn't believe any book could ever know." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Startlingly honest, bracing personal essays from a perceptive educator that bring us into the world of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and learning.

What does it mean to be a young Black man with an immigrant father and a white mother, teaching in a school system that historically has held an exclusionary definition of success?

In eight illuminating essays, Matthew R. Morris grapples with this question, and others related to identity and perception. After graduating high school in Scarborough, Morris spent four years in the U.S. on multiple football scholarships and, having spent that time in the States experiencing "the Mecca of hip hop and Black culture," returned home with a newfound perspective.

Now an elementary school teacher himself in Toronto, Morris explores the tension between his consumption of Black culture as a child, his teenage performances of the ideas and values of the culture that often betrayed his identity, and the ways society and the people guiding him--his parents, coaches, and teachers--received those performances.

What emerges is a painful journey toward transcending performance altogether, toward true knowledge of the self.