Matthew R. Morris

speaker

250 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Matthew R. Morris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Audiobook Café · Black Boys Like Me: In Conversation with by Matthew R. Morris · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

So yes, it was, I want to say, 30 years in the making of this book, for sure.

Yeah, Black Boys Like Me is a collection of essays that deal with my confrontations with race, with identity, with belonging, which happens to be the subtitle of the book.

It covers these various institutional pillars such as sports,

education, the whole nature versus nurture debate in culture and upbringing and being raised and clothing, aesthetics.

It looks at the ways in which our experiences manifest and make us who we are.

And for me, as a Black male, as a Black boy who grew up in this community that is

ostensibly underserved and at risk and having to navigate these different institutions like school, like sports, like hip hop culture and deciding on what clothes I would wear and what tattoos I would get or if I would or wouldn't get them.

This book's a meditation and a manifestation on all those things and essentially how our experiences shape exactly who we are and define our identities.

In a sense, Jacob, in a sense, right?

Like I think when we really,

break down the layers of our identity, right?

There's always an element of performativity that we act or that we enact anytime we are outside of our four walls, anytime that we are engaging in relationships with other human beings.

And for me,

I was so informed by Blackness, whether it be the stereotype of what it meant to be or whether it was something that was so deeply ingrained and baked in that it had become entrenched with me.

And those sentences come from the first chapter in the book titled 4 AM in Brooklyn, where I'm leaving a New Year's Eve party and I'm walking towards a subway station.

And while I'm walking towards the subway station to get back to my hotel for the evening,

I pass a police station.

And subconsciously, almost passing the police station, I decide to enact or perform a certain type of Black masculinity.

I pull up my jean pants a little bit.

I fix my hat so it doesn't look, quote unquote, menacing.

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