Matthew R. Morris writes about growing up Black and navigating race and identity in book Black Boys Like Me
The Toronto writer spoke with The Next Chapter’s Ryan B. Patrick about his personal essay collection
Matthew R. Morris was influenced by the prominent Black male figures he saw in sports, TV shows and music while growing up in Scarborough, Ont. Morris is the son of a white mother and immigrant Black father, and grew up striving for academic success whilst confronting Black stereotypes and exploring hip hop culture in the 1990s. In his collection of eight personal essays, Black Boys Like Me, he examines his own experiences with race and identity throughout childhood into his current work as an educator in Toronto.
Morris is a writer, advocate and educator currently based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Black Boys Like Me is his first book.
Morris spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about Black Boys Like Me.
The title of the book is Black Boys Like Me. You grew up in Scarborough — who was a Black boy like Matthew Morris?
Ironically, there wasn't too many Black boys around me other than my contemporary friends and things like that, right? So it was more of looking up to Black men that we saw on TV through rap videos or on TSN at the time, watching sporting events, basketball and football. It was the men that we looked up to and through some of these other situations, like schooling. We were almost forced to be Black men before we could even go through our youthful trials and tribulations and just be Black boys. The "Black boys like me" that I looked up to was in real time, just comparing myself to friends that lived in the same area of Scarborough and seeing how they lived compared to how I lived and what they were interested in. It was a contemporary comparison in real time.
You mentioned in the book that you're not an expert in anything but your own experience. What do you mean by that?
When it comes to literature around Blackness, there is somewhat of a higher educational gate, a white picket, ivory tower gate that exists where people speak on Blackness, and in particular, Black masculinity, from a position of authority where they claim to have a full grasp and understanding of the Black experience. I think that is erroneous and I also think it's somewhat irresponsible because Blackness exists in a continuum outside of one's personal experience. It's very hard to claim an expertise in understanding what it means to exist as a Black man. So for me, I'm merely speaking, not from the inside looking out or from the outside looking in — I'm taking my position in the dead centre and just looking around.
Blackness exists in a continuum and outside of one's personal experience.- Matthew R. Morris
Speaking of your experience, you're fiercely proud of your heritage and your family. You characterize your parents as being a white Canadian mother and a Black immigrant father. Tell me about your parents.
Both my parents came from hardscrabble beginnings. My mother was a first-generation Canadian, her parents came over from Poland during World War One and my father immigrated here when he was 18 or 19 years old from Jamaica. He worked in a factory, my mother worked in a low blue-collared job. My mother's experience of raising two young Black boys was something that I speak to in the book. I think it's somewhat of a throughline in the book. I tried to arrive at the end of this idea of race and racism and belonging in terms of, not necessarily a remedy for what we can do as a culture, but how to perhaps look at race and belonging in a way that transcends identity.
One of the essays in the book you talk about going to high school in Scarborough, Ont., and you actually loved reading and learning. But school was often a difficult time, in terms of getting good grades and being a "model student." What was your high school experience like?
My high school experience was nuanced. On the one hand, I leaned into this idea that because I was Black and had somewhat of an athletic tendency that I would pursue that avenue in life into adulthood. Because my sport of significance was football, even till this day, you still needed to try to pursue a college entry to play NCAA football or play football at the next level. There was always that piece of understanding that I still had to do decent enough to get into college if I wanted to play football. But as I reflect back, there's this complicated identity politics that existed within me and I know that it existed within other Black males. On the one hand, of course you prioritize and want to succeed academically in school. But on the other hand, there's all these nuances and implicit, subtle racism that occurs once you do succeed academically as a Black male. It almost is as if you succeeding as a Black male strips parts of your Blackness away. That's largely because of public discourse of what academic success looks like in contrast to what Blackness is supposed to be and supposed to look like. So this gets internalized from an early age. I felt that if I was to succeed academically, for some reason I had to hide it from my friends.
There's all these nuances and implicit, subtle racism that occurs once you do succeed academically as a Black male.- Matthew R. Morris
The title of that chapter is The Fresh Prince Syndrome and it's because I have this vivid image of an episode where Will is reminiscing with one of his old friends from back in Philadelphia and they're talking about Will walking home, hiding his books in a pizza box. To me, that symbolizes the plight and the nuanced reality that Black males sometimes experience in academic settings where they want to succeed academically but there are so many roadblocks that are set up for them to not be able to or have to diminish or or lower their their inclinations academically.
In the essay collection you talk about becoming a middle school teacher and how [in your approach to education] you bring your whole self to it. You went to picture day and you dressed up how you wanted to dress up. How were you dressed for picture day?
Picture day was a balmy September day. It was probably 30 degrees Celsius already at 8:45 in the morning so I wore a T-shirt and shorts. I thought it was appropriate enough for a picture as a middle school teacher in the middle of the city. I had a situation that I wrote about in the chapter on clothing and aesthetics where my principal questioned me about the clothes that I was wearing. For me, it implied a little bit of racism in the questioning because, as I noticed later, there was a colleague who was pretty much wearing what I was wearing in the morning. He had cargo pants on, he was wearing sandals and a T-shirt but he was an older white guy. Reflecting on that situation — where I was just dressed as I would normally dress — I thought there was nothing wrong with the way I was dressed in terms of being an educator. So that situation is just one piece in the book where I highlight some of the ways in which Black males are surveilled and policed to a certain extent.
I know that it is important for young Black students, particularly young Black males, to see representations of themselves- Matthew R. Morris
When it comes to my career in education I am intentional about the way that I show up in educational spaces because I know that it is important for young Black students, particularly young Black males, to see representations of themselves that exist in ways that embody the culture that they're familiar with and that is endearing to them, but at the same time exist in a space that shows them that academic excellence is something to strive towards as well. They should be able to see men that they aspire to be like on whatever level, whether it's just aesthetic level, that work in spaces like education.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
