What Black Boys Write When They Think No One's Watching

Shit.

I didn’t bring the journal for them. Not really. I don’t know why I brought it at all. Maybe because it was heavy. Maybe because I’d been carrying it around for years and it needed to breathe.

They sat there, slouched in chairs like boys always do. Feet tapping, chewing gum, distracted and annoying and holy. This is a free period. Normally, we spoke anime or rap music. Today, I handed the old book over like contraband.

They flipped through it like it was someone else's porn stash. They read quiet. One of them snorted. One raised an eyebrow. One just stared at the page like it knew him better than he knew himself.

It wasn’t poetry. Not really. It was what I wrote when my body was doing things I couldn’t explain. When I knew how to talk to God without lying. When Ashakee Mahabeer kissed me and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking for hours. I wrote because there was no other place to put all of it.

My parents were sending me to a “top school.” It was supposed to keep me focused. A distraction they could afford. But they didn’t know I was already somewhere else. In my head. In that goddamn journal.

When my mother found one page, she acted like I’d killed someone. Her mouth twisted like the words stank. “This is what we are sending you over Spur Tree Hill for?” Like writing something soft made me suspect. Or I plotting to mass impregnate the neighborhood. Or something worse - backslide.

After that, I wrote in secret. Quiet as sin. And if I’m being honest, I would’ve rather been caught hard in standing in front of the church on Sunday, Cialis bricked than caught with that notebook with feelings. At least a hard-on fades. That kind of shame lingers.

That journal held everything I was too scared to say or ask. All the wanting. The prayers I wrote like threats. The nights I wished I could start over with a different me. Different voice. Less ache. More confidence.

Today, they read it like archaeologists. Like it was ruins : a different culture, time and place. Like they knew it wasn’t theirs, but they recognized something in it anyway. One of them asked if Ashakee was real. I didn’t answer. I still stalk her Instagram.

And then—like it was nothing—one of them pulled his own notebook out his gym bag. Said, “Sir, I got one too.” It was crumpled. It smelled like sweat, Hot Cheetos and piss.

The writing was crooked and dumb and perfect.

Another rap lyrics .

Another a ‘Slut me out’ remix.

Another said, “So wait—we can write that real stuff too?”

I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no.

They already knew.

---

Camus said,

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

I think about that often. I think about the first time I saw a man cry and didn’t flinch. The first time I held silence in my mouth and didn’t choke. The first time I wrote something and didn’t feel ashamed.

And now, in this classroom, I watch boys with hard eyes and bored stares drag their pencils across lined paper like it owes them money. I watch them fight the impulse to look soft. I watch them sit in that same strange discomfort I did at their age—the one where you know you have something to say but no room to say it in.

They don’t trust people or paper. Paper is snitch. Paper is permanent. Paper can be used against you. Ask any boy who ever got suspended over a text message. Ask any boy who wrote a love note that got passed around and laughed at. Ask me.

That’s why I knew it was a risk—to bring them into my old journals. It’s not just about “sharing writing.” That sounds too sterile. Too safe. What I did was tear off the mask in front of kids who still believe the mask is the man. What I did was violate the contract we have as male teachers—to be composed, unbothered, unimpressed.

But I’m tired of that lie. Ha ! I pulled a Coach Carter but seriously.

I’m tired of watching boys self-destruct because nobody ever gave them a better way to be. We hand them basketballs, Bibles, and barbershop advice and call it culture. We tell them to pray more, fight less, smile occasionally, and for God’s sake, don’t write anything down that makes you look weak.

We want them obedient, but not introspective. Articulate, but not emotional. Present, but not complicated. But they are complicated. Of course they are.

There is no greater complication. I can think of so many of them as I write.

And we, as educators, are often the first and last adults who will see them for who they are—not who they perform. So if I can create a crack in that performance, if I can bring in something from my own life that makes them say, “Wait... you too?”—then maybe that’s worth the risk.

Because it’s not just about writing. It’s about building altars where shame used to live. Ha preacher's voice.

Psychologically, the journal was the only place I could metabolize my confusion. That matters. Black boys experience hyper-vigilance from a young age. Their nervous systems adapt to suspicion, to silence, to compression. And when there’s no safe outlet, that emotion calcifies. It hardens into sarcasm. Into rage. Into blank stares that dare you to care.

I'm new to the sociological culture. You don’t have to be a researcher to know that Black boys are punished more harshly, labeled more quickly, and discarded more easily than their peers. Their failures get pathologized. Their genius gets overlooked unless it entertains. They don’t get to be learners. They get turned into “risks.” Into cautionary tales before they even know how to spell “pedagogy.”

So when they write something honest, it is not just literacy. It is resistance.

It’s a refusal to be flattened.

Anaïs Nin said,

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But too often, these boys aren’t even given the first taste. Their lives are narrated for them before they have a chance to define it for themselves.

So writing becomes a reclamation. A middle finger to the world that sees them only in outline.

And I don’t have all the answers. I’m just a man with old journals and a classroom full of boys trying to pretend they’re not scared. But if I can let them borrow my bravery for a little while—if I can show them that there’s no shame in bleeding on the page—then maybe they’ll see that softness isn’t the enemy of strength.

Maybe they’ll write something raw and not rip it up. Maybe they’ll read something they wrote and not laugh it off. Maybe they’ll find their own “two or three great and simple images” in whose presence their heart can open. And maybe—if we’re lucky—someone will be there to catch it.

Because no matter what anyone says, I believe Black boys deserve more than survival.They deserve a witness.They deserve a voice.They deserve to taste life twice.

Once in the body.

And again—on the page.

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