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

"Startingly honest, bracing personal essays, from educator and writer Matthew Morris, that explore the intersection of race, Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and education. This is an examination of the parts that construct my Black character; from how public schooling shapes our ideas about ourselves to how hip-hop and sports are simultaneously the conduit for both Black abundance and Black boundaries. This book is a meditation on the influences that have shaped Black boys like me. What does it mean to be a young Black man with an immigrant father and a white mother living on Indigenous land? In Black Boys Like Me, Matthew Morris grapples with this question, and others related to identity and belonging. He explores the tension between his consumption of Black culture as a child, his teenage performances of the ideas, identities, 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."--