J’wan Morning Wears His Pants at His Waist in Protest

I first met J’wan Morning at a Black Student Association poetry slam. I was never a fan of slam poems or poets screaming at the audience, so I did not expect to like any of the poetry, let alone be floored by it. Morning’s “A Ghetto,” however, did floor me. He performed it stealing the breaths out of my throat, sobering my intoxication with rhymes and entendre detailing his identity — as well as the complex and muffled identities of a whole generation.
I approached him — excited to have found a fellow poet to distract my diaspora and manipulate language with. To my surprise, he was not only a poet but also a fashion design major. His philosophy for both of these art forms figuratively weaves and embroiders his poetry, rhetoric and ideologies onto his design aesthetic and fashion creations.
Today, J’wan is finishing up his Senior fashion collection at the Savannah College of Art Design. Titled A Dream Survived, the collection explores an authentic queer experience, especially in relation to masculinity. “I wanted to flip the ideas of being the black sheep or the elephant in the room into something to celebrate,” Morning said.
On social media, photoshoots of black men against pink backdrops, with flowers or glitter in their beards, resurface continually. These photoshoots serve as an attempt to ‘redefine’ masculinity. However, many see it as a shallow attempt, citing that masculinity is not defined or redefined by men’s outerwear or rose-filtered photographs but by changing their attitudes and behaviors.
“We see the flower boys on Instagram,” J’wan said, “But in all honesty redefining masculinity is much more of flowers wilting than it is flowers blooming.”
In her book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, bell hooks says “black males in the culture of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy are feared, but they are not loved,” arguing that “If black males were loved they could hope for more than a life locked down, caged, confined; they could imagine themselves beyond containment.”
J’wan shares a similar sentiment with hooks. His poem A Ghetto details the upbringing of young black boys in a world that does not love them; that does not allow them to feel. These boys are born “without tears to quench,” born “with fists for hands and sneakers for feet” and born to “stiffen and sulk but never smile.” He navigates this theory by criticizing the pressure applied to young black men to follow specific career paths or be molded into unmalleable, stiff caricatures of manhood:
“Although they’ve been taught to ought to be bricks
All black boys want to fly
but basketballs and footballs anchor their ambitions.
The new challenge becomes learning how to walk with pants below their waists
down sidewalks that have learned their outline early
awaiting the day they call it home.”
“Growing up, we cannot all have the same dream,” J’wan told me, explaining that black men are especially asked to perform the roles of one-dimensional, uniform and uncomplex humans, unable to explore or express their identities fully. “We are not all basketball players. But your father put a basketball in your hand before he put a pacifier there,” J’wan cited this as the problem, before letting out a snarky snicker.

J’wan explains that being force-fed dreams of basketball and toughness as well as existing within a system that actively oppresses and humiliates black men, does more harm than good.
Studies have found that young Black males frequently do as well or better than their White counterparts right up until the “gender intensification” years of 10- 14, when drop-out and stop-out rates begin to climb, and grade point averages begin to drop. Both of these can be tied to masculine norms.
I approached scholar and author Imani Michelle-Scott to comment on the topic of Black masculinity, but unfortunately, she was not available at the time.
Listening to J’wan speak his mind on this made me question if in fact there was such a thing as “Black masculinity.” Or if it were just an issue of masculinity in general or — more specifically — masculinity under imbalanced power dynamics and systems.
Growing up in Palestine under the Israeli military occupation, I became familiar with militant masculinity very quickly. When people — mainly men — live in a literal open-air prison composed of refugee camps and military checkpoints; when their basic human rights are disappeared novelties; and when they feel as though they have been emasculated by the state that occupies them, they tend to overcompensate and become more macho — indulging in notions of masculinity that relate entirely to toughness and apathy.
This complex phenomenon has been seen across nations in which power dynamics have “emasculated,” the men of said nations.
During a phone interview, Haneen Maikey, the director of alQaws for Gender & Sexual Diversity in Palestinian Society, told me that colonialism and racism have a direct influence on masculinity and gender and that “overcompensation,” is not an inaccurate term to describe the phenomena, but rather a term not nuanced enough to capture its multifacetedness. Asserting that this is seen in Palestine, Maikey said men under occupation need to assert their dominance and power, so it does not seem that their marginalization is a result of their weakness.
J’wan Morning knows he is not weak — however, he also feels no need to parade and peacock his strength.
When I asked him if he had plans for his poetry, he told me he hopes to publish his debut book of poetry, I Wear My Pants At My Waist In Protest, soon. When asked about the significance of the title, he just smirked. J’wan wears his pants at his waist in protest, in rejection of all the notions and prototypes narrowed down to represent a toxic and imprisoning idea of manhood.

