In this paper the authors draw on the perspectives of black teachers to provide a more nuanced analysis of male teacher shortage. Interviews with two Caribbean teachers in Toronto, Canada, are employed to illuminate the limits of an explanatory framework that foregrounds the singularity of gender as a basis for advocating male teachers as role models. The study concludes that educational policy attempting to address male teacher shortage would benefit from engaging with both analytic frameworks and empirical research that is capable of unravelling the politics of representation and intersectionality as they relate to addressing questions of male teacher shortage in elementary schools. (Contains 3 notes.)