Matthew R. Morris is pictured with his mom and dad.Supplied
Matthew R. Morris is a writer, speaker, educator and author of Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging.
For me, it started in Grade 6, when I decided to grow out my hair.
At the time, my best friends were David, Ronnie and Roy. We had been close since the age of 8, sharing an interest in everything from school to sports to songs. Even style. We copied the hairstyles of the favourite teen boppers. My friends earned extra points among the girls because their hair was already sandy brown and blond. We all knew the words to the music playing on the radio by the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls. We played road hockey on side streets and dreamed about having Wayne Gretzky as the Leafs’ captain instead of Doug Gilmour. In French class, we learned Frère Jacques and praised Jean Chrétien. Our teachers looked like the anchors on the news who reported apartment fires and car accidents on the 401 or the parents on the popular sitcoms we watched at night.
I was immersed in this culture, and I loved being a part of it. So much so that I decided to grow out my hair. I wanted to look like the boys on Home Improvement and the ones that sang in NSYNC. But instead of falling toward my shoulders, my hair grew out of my head and up toward the sky. I lamented so often to my mom that she eventually brought home some mousse from Shoppers Drug Mart. I would shower in the morning, forgo drying my hair, part it down the middle and then plant a thick cloud of white foam right on the top. I stared into the mirror as I pressed my curls until they vanished. When I was finished I got dressed and walked two short blocks to my elementary school. By lunch time my friends didn’t have to tell me what I could already feel. Their eyes said it all. A bathroom break would confirm what I knew. I should have packed the mousse in my knapsack right with my math textbook and lunch bag.
Then my mom brought home Dippity Do gel. She didn’t tell me, she just bought it. The gel in that first bottle was purple. I emptied it in 2½ weeks. The colour in the next bottle she bought was bright green. I prayed into the mirror when I lathered the goo onto the top of my head after getting out of the shower. I just wanted my hair to sit down. To sit still. To behave. To act like David, Ronnie and Roy. To act just like I acted every single day. By the time that bell rang to signal dismissal I couldn’t wait to get home – to put more gel on and try again.
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Around this time, I began to notice that I was trying to fit into a social space that was rapidly evolving. It was the nineties, the National Basketball Association was expanding and Toronto was getting a team that they would name the Raptors. My teachers asked: Wasn’t I so happy? My friends and I would play basketball on Ronnie’s driveway hoop. All of a sudden, they – my boys – deferred to me. I was their Michael Jordan, even though I didn’t dribble or shoot any better than they did. One of our teachers bumped me up to the front of the line when he rolled out the basketball cart in gym class. It wasn’t in the way I wanted, but I began to belong. Their silent whispers began to speak to me in a way that made me feel at home.
That was when Snoop Dogg became just as prominent on TV as the white folks who anchored news broadcasts and shot pucks on ice and sang in boy bands. My friends asked me what “Gin and Juice” was. I went home and asked my dad before doing my math homework. The next day at school I told them that he wouldn’t tell me because I was too young to know. They asked me if I could rap for them. I started memorizing rap lyrics that night. Because I wanted to belong. And somewhere, deep down, I knew this was my way to do it.
Mementos from Morris's younger years.Courtesy of family
The following year I began junior high, where I met Dwight, Greg and Joel. My new school was down the block and filled with Black boys who looked like me. David, Ronnie and Roy went there too, but these new boys were different. These boys never tried to grow their hair to look like boys I wanted to look like. They had heard but never listened to songs by the bands I had been surrounded by. They too learned from teachers who looked like the news anchors, but their teachers told them to focus on the faces shown in the top-right corner of the screen while stories of crime and violence aired. Faces that looked like theirs. These boys told me that they listened to whispers that taught them to pay attention or they’d end up in the top-right corner of the screen, too. The whispers they heard were louder than the ones I’d heard and suggested leaving them on the outside, shutting the front door in their faces. The ones they heard taught them how, and where, they should belong.
Once I’d graduated eighth grade, my dad took me to his barber. Conrad’s was the name on the storefront, and I’m almost certain that it was Conrad himself who cut my hair. He used a level-two guard on the top and faded the sides. He used an old-fashioned razor blade to give me a 45-degree-angle part that started at the tip of my hairline and cut through my hair for about an inch. In that barbershop, they sang songs by Spragga Benz, Jay-Z and Nas. I didn’t belong. I didn’t yet see how their culture was part of our culture. My culture.
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By the time I reached high school I had started to hear the phrase, “As a Black person, you have to work twice as hard …” To be twice as good to get half as far. Variations of that whispered to us by Black elders. Variations of a message that conveyed the same meaning: that our culture and their culture were two different things. I heard it but I still tried not to listen.
By then my teachers – my mentors – told me to take an extra gym class. In Grade 12, my schedule had become English, gym, fashion, gym. And that schedule was who I had become. I even found time to freestyle rap with my boys – like Dwight, Greg and Joel – boys who by force of becoming and belonging I had grown close to. I was making up my own rap lyrics by then. That schedule, those whispers, this idea of who I ought to be – it all taught me where I belonged.
The funny thing is: I loved it. Because I was still hemmed to a little patch of the Canadian experience, a patch that was part of an entire blanket. It felt like I existed in two worlds at the same time.
Morris with his mom.Supplied
Finally, I stilled their whispers and attuned my ears to what had been silently spoken to me about being a Black boy with a Canadian birth certificate who only really ever knew this home and native land. I decided to shove it all in their faces when I swaggered across the stage to receive my university degree: my tattoos, earrings, memorized hip-hop lyrics, my athletic advantages. They had taught us about our culture, Canadian culture, and then told me how to live in it.
Yet by the time I became a teacher I had created a schism within my own identity in order to belong. I covered my tattoos with long-sleeved plaid shirts and took out my earrings and tucked away those hip-hop lyrics, far away from my classroom. I became peers – colleagues – with the likes of David, Ronnie and Roy, now men like me. I saw them less and less. We had drifted into acquaintances, sharing nothing more in common than the statuses we earned, the careers we’d ended up in, and an idea about what our culture meant to, and for, us. Shaped by what we were taught and who we listened to. So I listened, still.
And I listened as they whispered:
It’s the system. No, it’s their attitude. No, it’s because of how they were raised. The environment plays a big role. No, it’s the stereotypes that they have to duck and dodge on a daily basis. I mean, c’mon, ever heard of microaggressions? You haven’t? See – you’re part of the problem. No, it’s not you, it’s them. No, it’s those low expectations that teachers have for them. Yes, blame the teachers. No, blame hip-hop. No … sssh, don’t say this too loud, but I mean, let’s be real – it’s them, isn’t it? Isn’t it? It has to be. No?
No.
I didn’t say no. I never said anything. I just listened. Because that was how they made me. After listening for so long, I began to recognize what I now know to be true: Through their whispers they’ve showed me what to do and how to behave in order to belong. Loud and clear. Quietly suggesting how I should exist. I’ve heard them now. That is how Black boys are born.