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 · last 12 months

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

yeah you're not wrong right like there was an element of comfort of like this is this is what's expected of me this is this is part of the identity of being a young black male in this urban setting like i'm supposed to come late to class i'm i'm supposed to not care about school so i might as well perform that

that character right and i i titled it you know the fresh prince syndrome because you think about that show in the 90s the fresh prince where you had these two like archetypes of black figures black masculine characters you had will smith he was like the class clown the guy who was good at sports and got all the girls and

didn't care about school and this cool suave dude.

And then you had Carlton who was like the nerd who played all these different obscure sports and was the Richie Rich kid.

And it painted this picture of like black masculinity and the only ways you can fit in, right?

And for me, there's also like a deeper layer to that, Jacob.

I think part of it when I think back and I deeply reflect on why I would come late

or listen to music while I was entering a classroom is I think the school in a...

again subconscious way was like passively rejecting my authentic identity like they were like there's no way you could dress like this but also still care about yourself intellectually and academically this wasn't explicitly told to me but in it in an implicit way it was kind of whispered so because the school was passively rejecting me as a black male or my fluidity as a black male

I made those decisions to kind of, in my own way, reject the school.

And one of those decisions was like coming late to class.

Whereas in university, the dynamic changes, it's not necessarily a site where you can perform that passive resistance, right?

When you're walking into a university undergraduate class of 200 people or 50 people,

Or even 20 people.

When the professor is doing their job and they're lecturing and you come in, they barely know your name.

let alone addressing the reasons why you are not adhering to the codes of the school.

And therefore, it no longer, the university space that is, becomes this site where I was able to perform this passive resistance, like nobody cared in a sense, right?

Everybody there, the entire ethos of the university

the space of university was completely different than the space of high school.

And for little old me, who was trying to use education and the school space as a marker for trying to resist the institution, it just didn't function like that anymore.

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