Thursday, February 27, 2025 — 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Join us for the next installment of Anti-Racism Reads, which will feature a conversation with the author Matthew R. Morris about his book Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging.
We have copies of this book available at no cost to reduce barriers to participation. Please indicate when you register if you would like a copy.
All available copies have been claimed. Books are available for purchase at the W Store, Words Worth Books, or to borrow from our libraries, KPL or WPL.
Event details:
Date: Thursday February 27, 2025
Time: 12 – 1 p.m.
Location: Fed Hall
Facilitator: Jermal Jones
Find the book: Library’s catalogue (Omni)
About the book
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 US 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.
With the wide-reaching scope of Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In and the introspective snapshot of life in Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Boys Like Me is an unflinching debut that invites readers to create braver spaces and engage in crucial conversations around race and belonging.
Source: Penguin Random House
About the author
Matthew R. Morris is an educator, anti-racism advocate and writer based out of Toronto. He is the author of the instant national bestseller, Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging. He earned a BA and an MA in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. In addition to teaching, his work and public speaking on the deconstruction of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture and schooling has taken him across North America to consult on and learn about the challenges facing students and educators in the current education system.
He has written articles for TVO, Huffington Post, ETFO Voice, and Education Canada and in 2015, he delivered his TED Talk, “The Fresh Prince Syndrome.” Morris has been featured in Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Globe & Mail, and on CBC Radio and CityNews Toronto. He currently teaches in the Faculty of Education at Ontario Tech University and believes that the more credentials behind his name only equate to the more tattoos down his forearms.
About the facilitator
Jermal Alleyne Jones is associate director, EDIA, at the University of Waterloo Libraries and co-founder of Next Gen Men (NGM), a team of staff and volunteers empowering boys (and men) to change the way they see, think and act about masculinity. He is also a second-year PhD student in the Recreation and Leisure Aging, Health and Wellbeing program. He studies the intersections between race (Black), ethnicity, gender (men) and ag(e)ing from an interdisciplinary lens.
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