Home / Books / Loving Black Boys

Loving Black Boys

A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering

Cover of Loving Black Boys features a purple and orange color overlay depicting two young boys walking together on a street, one with an arm around the other's shoulder. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 332

Illustrations: 17 illustrations

Release Date: May 12, 2026

Author: Tamura Lomax

Loving Black Boys is not just a love letter to Tamura Lomax’s own sons, but to all Black boys, men, fathers, and brothers. With understanding and urgency, Lomax writes honestly about Black endangerment and what it means to endure living in what James Baldwin called the “burning house” of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal America. Seeing the full humanity of Black boys and men, and the liberation of all Black people, Lomax writes, requires a Black feminist lens. A companion piece to Freeing Black Girls, this book connects the everyday and extraordinary moments of Black mothering: phenomena as varied as “the talk” about police brutality, physical and emotional violence, Christian nationalism, miseducation, emotional health, sports, and more, which produce not only shared vulnerabilities but also tensions among Black folks. To her sons and to all Black men, Lomax insists that Black feminism, which emphasizes mutuality, protection, ethical autonomy, and healing, is vital to forging a safer future for individual and collective survival.

Praise

“This important and ground-breaking book engages questions of mothering and rearing young Black boys from a Black feminist perspective. Lomax offers a rare blend of compelling storytelling together with deep engagements with contemporary Black culture, history, and feminist theory. Loving Black Boys is a compelling defense of Black boyhood as a category whose integrity should be maintained. The adultification of Black children is a social crisis and this book offers an important corrective.” - Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“Loving Black Boys is an impassioned case for a kind of Black feminist mothering that could bring forth Black sons who don’t rely on girls and women to serve as punching bags on their journeys toward healing. Lomax’s gift to us, to Black sons and our mommas, is one I’ve been waiting for all of my life. I am better because of it. The relationships of so many will be healed by this salve.” - Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

Buy

Availability: Loading...

Price: Loading...

Request a desk or exam copy

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top
Tamura Lomax is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University and author of Freeing Black Girls and Jezebel Unhinged, also published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Author’s Note  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Surviving White Supremacy: A Practice of Black Living Hope  1
1. Proverbs for Black Boys: A Letter to My Sons (Writing the Kitchen Table)  19
2. Periodizing and Parrying Crisis: Black Mothering from the Other America, or Notes from the Field  35
3. The Talk: Public Enemy #1 (“Is God a White Racist?”)  63
4. Bloodletting in the Mouth of a Dragon: Black Patriarchy Won’t Save Us  91
5. Total and Absolute War: The Miseducation of Black Boys  119
6. #ProtectBlackMen: For Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Michael Singleton, and All Black Boys  159
7. Competing Pandemics: Autonomy, Misogynoir, and Rape Are Urgent Black Matters  197
Coda. Parable of the Living: Surviving Octavia Butler’s America While Black  229
Notes  243
Bibliography  305
Index  311

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3870-2 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3379-0 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6228-8 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478062288