The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, THE BLACK Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.

It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. 

This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race, Essays, Social Justice, Writing, Politics

304 pages, Paperback

Published March 18, 2025

About the author

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

Reviews

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually enjoyed this one. I say that, because I’m not really a fan of Henry Louis Gates. But here he has done a good job of examining and explaining how we (AAs) have wrote ourselves into relevance and hence, have stepped out of the box. A great mix of scholarship and plain spoken-ness. We are given examples through their writing of the great debates between some notable historical figures. I was overall quite impressed with this effort from Mr. Gates. I do believe this book is worthy of your time.

“Heated debates within the Black community, beginning as early as the first decades of the nineteenth cen-tury, have ranged from what names "the race" should publicly call itself (William Whipper versus James Mc-Cune Smith) to whether or not enslaved men and women should rise in arms against their masters (Henry Highland Garnet versus Frederick Douglass). Ought we to pursue economic development or political rights (Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois)? Should Black people return to Africa (Marcus Garvey versus W. E.B. Du Bois)? Should we admit publicly the pivotal role of African elites in enslaving our ancestors (Ali Mazrui versus Wole Soyinka)?”

Some of these debates are still being had today, so to have them properly placed in historical perspective is a great asset to any student and studier of history 👏🏿

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the concept of the book and enjoyed it. This is a short journey through history in literature examining how Black Americans write and think about themselves. The idea of the black box is that it has many meanings. It starts with Gates discussing his granddaughter and her white father checking a box on race on a form for school enrollment indicating that she is "Black" even though her DNA indicates that she is 80% "white ancestry" (my words not Gates). This goes back to the notion of one drop of negro blood... It also illustrates a father that does not want to deny his daughter any of her heritage. Gates goes on to describe the boxes that Blacks are put into in terms of expectations, characterizations, stereotypes etc. He also makes note of the black box in airplanes that no one really understands how it works or what is inside. For me, some really clever insight from this frame of reference.

On the whole an interesting read that for me seemed a little light or rather not nearly as substantive as its potential. Of course that would have been a much longer work. Of particular irritation to me is Gate's lack of exploration with regard to Black women writers. Gates spends most of this book in the pre-civil rights movement, mostly Reconstruction and Jim Crow South. Not many famous women writers of note there but what few existed, were barely mentioned. The biggest mention was Phyllis Wheatly. After that a light mentions of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, not much else. No Nella Larson or Jessie Redmon Fauset. Lots of Fredrick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B DuBois. Nary a mention of Maya Angelou, a passing reference to the 1619 project without mentioning Nicole Hannah-Jones. The dearth of female representation in this book was disappointing. On the whole a good book and interesting examination of the subject...but it could have been great!


4 Stars

Listened to the audiobook. Dominic Hoffman was a very good narrator.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The book’s final essay was a response that I published in the New York Times to attempts by Governor Ron DeSantis to censor the African-American studies AP curriculum in the state of Florida.” Professor Henry Louis Gates, THE BLACK BOX

[Anthony Yodice · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history book. Gates does a wonderful job of walking us through Black American History. It's ludicrous for a white man to try to understand the Black experience, but this book helped me to understand Black culture in our historic context.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've watched some of Mr Gates' television offerings and found them interesting and often moving. This book is a written version of a course he taught at Harvard. In each chapter I found new information and insights into our country's relationship with slavery and the descendents of the enslaved. A worthwhile read.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The most dramatic representation or revision of Du Bois's metaphor came in Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was Hurston's definition of double consciousness, in terms of an African American woman's quest for identity and fulfillment, that set off one of the most bitter debates in the history of African American letters, between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. The debate became very personal, but it was in fact about modes of representation, about modernism and naturalism itself. In reviews of each other's books, sexual politics met literary politics head-on, for the first time so publicly in African American literary history.
In a very angry and suggestive review in New Masses, Wright, three years before he published his classic novel of naturalism, Native Son, criticizes both Hurston and her novel:
Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley.
Her dialogue
manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that's as far it goes.
Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.... The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.
"In the main," Wright concludes, "her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy," with the word "satisfy" serving as a veiled reference to Hurston's depiction of her protagonist's sexuality. He then outright accuses her of titillating her white male readers: "The romantic Janie, in the highly-charged language of Miss Hurston, longed to be a pear tree in blossom and have a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace." Wright was not satisfied. Z
Less than a year later, Wright published Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of four interrelated novellas. Now it was Hurston's turn. "This is a book about hatreds," she begins her review. "Mr.
Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work....
[O]ne wonders what he would have done had he dealt with plots that touched the broader and more fundamental phases of Negro life instead of confining himself to the spectacular."
Wright's hero, Big Boy, she continues, in a most mocking manner, "is a stupid, blundering character, but full of pathos.... In the third story, the hero gets the white man most Negro men rail against-the white man who possesses a Negro woman. He gets several of them while he is about the business of choosing to die in a hurricane of bullets and fire because his woman has had a white man.
"There is lavish killing here, perhaps enough to satisfy all male Black readers," but not Miss Hurston, nor anyone who loves Black culture from the inside, she suggests: "the reader sees the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late. A dismal, hopeless section ruled by brutish hatred and nothing else.
Mr. Wright's author's solution, is the solution of the PARTY-state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding one's self. And march!"
And whereas Wright had criticized Hurston's use of dialect, or Black vernacular speech, in her novel as a form of neo-minstrelsy, Hurston turns the tables on Wright by noting: "Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing.
One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly, he does not write by ear unless he is tone deaf." His dialect is a form of "broken speech," not musical or artistic or expressive of the depths of Black culture at all. [8]
Hurston concludes her review by saying that instead of pandering to the political or "the spectacular," as she puts it, she hoped that Wright would someday be able to find a theme worthy of a great novel, a theme rooted firmly and squarely
"in Negro life" itself, and not in sensationalist representations of Black-white violence, rape, and lynching in the South. Hurston describes herself, in her author's biographical note, as having written a novel "of life among her own people," whereas, she implies, Wright is obsessed with the seemingly irresistible force of white people, or white racism, in Black people's lives.
In these two reviews, we see a coded exchange, a debate between the literary forms of modernism and naturalism: Hurston used the mode of lyrical modernism to write her novels;
Wright used naturalism. And the difference is between what you think of the role of individual will and individual choice, or "agency," versus environmental factors, or "structure," in the shaping of a person's fate.
We can see this clearly if we reflect on the structure of Wright's fiction. Wright published Native Son in 1940, three years after Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God. His was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection of a Black author's work. It became a runaway bestseller. In the novel, Bigger Thomas (whose name is a rather obvious play on "Nigger") lives a life of despair in a ghetto in Chicago, one determined by large supraforces of race and class.
Bigger's life falls apart when he accidentally murders a rich white girl, the daughter of the man for whom he is a chauffeur. Then he murders his own girlfriend, a Black woman named Bessie.
After an intense chase, he is captured and of course found guilty and sentenced to death. He dies in the electric chair.
Native Son is a naturalist novel. It is told in the third person through an omniscient narrator who tells us what Bigger is thinking, what Bigger would say if he only had the words and the knowledge to express himself as eloquently as the narrator does. Bigger doesn't act, like Janie Crawford in Hurston's novel does; he reacts.
Bigger is like a pinball in a pinball machine.
Bigger's life and his life choices are determined by the twin social forces of racism and economic exploitation. He has no choice but to live the life of the walking dead, and ultimately to commit murder to assert and define himself. He is an object, not a subject. Someone has to tell his tale for him; he cannot tell it himself. And the only way to change Bigger's life trajectory-that is, to give him subjectivity, to transform him from an object to a subject-would be to destroy completely the racist, capitalist system in which he is confined.
Wright draws upon naturalism to make the risky argument that Black people stuck in the nightmare cycle of the inner cities are not responsible for their tragic lives, their self-destructive behavior, and the destruction that a murderer such as Bigger wreaks upon society.
Instead, they are the true victims. Naturalism, in other words, is a mode of literary narration that embraces structure as the ultimate cause of all social ills and pathological behavior.
As Wright puts it:
To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one's feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force.
But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they acknowledged its reality.
As long as they lived here in this prescribed corner of the city, they paid mute tribute to it. 12]
Later in the book, he continues: "He had been so conditioned in a cramped environment that hard words or kicks alone knocked him upright and made him capable of action-action that was futile because the world was too much for him. It was then that he closed his eyes and struck out blindly, hitting what or whom he could, not looking or caring what or who hit back." 10
The differences between Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston help us to understand how literary form implies or reflects political ideology.
The list is long:
• Wright
focuses on Black/white
confrontation,
believing that Black
confrontation with anti-Black racism is everything. Hurston's work is more about Black-Black interactions in an all-Black world, where white people are offstage.
* Wright writes in the third person. Hurston writes in the first person.
* Wright's protagonist Bigger Thomas is static.
Hurston's Janie Crawford
dynamic.
* To Wright, a character's actions are determined by the system, by large supraforces such as racism, capitalism, or economics. Hurston's characters' actions are determined by individual will and individual choices. They make their own fates.
* Finally, for Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois's
"double-consciousness" is an affliction. It is the state of false consciousness, consciousness reflecting an alienation that can only be overcome through class-based revolution.
For Hurston,
double
consciousness is healthy. It is the condition of modernity itself. And it is only when Janie learns that she has double consciousness an inside and an outside that she must learn to navigate between— that she finds true liberation, reflected in her sexual liberation, in her decision to take as a lover a man much younger than she is, a man whom for the first time she truly loves. In the previous chapter I quoted Du Bois's essay "Criteria of Negro Art," from 1926, in which he upbraids the writers of the Harlem Renaissance because "[wle are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it.
Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom." Hurston was among Du Bois's readership, and, implicitly at least, she accepted this challenge that he issued when she published Their Eyes Were Watching God some eleven years later, which takes the music of the language of the Black vernacular, including linguistic rituals such as playing the dozens and signifying, and turns them into the language of fiction-into art.
In his review, Wright had criticized Hurston for representing Janie's experiencing her first orgasm under a pear tree, using language he felt was meant to titillate white readers, especially white males. Hurston felt, on the contrary, that it was Wright who was pandering to white readers, especially white males, by writing about Black violence against white racists. But it is clear that Wright was deeply troubled that Hurston created a Black female character who not only has healthy sexual fantasies, but who also goes through two marriages to Black men whom she doesn't love, who abuse her in one way or another, before finding ultimate sexual satisfaction with a
younger man who is much darker than she is, a lower-class, uneducated Black man who teaches her how to play checkers, shoot a gun, and work and make love for the sheer pleasure of both.
For Hurston, then, double consciousness or the recognition that one is made up of many consciousnesses, not just two (a Negro, an American, as Du Bois put it) is the beginning of freedom, of genuine self-knowledge, of the ultimate liberation, which will inevitably be individual, not based on one's group affiliation or ethnic identity or so-called race. Now that she realizes that she has a double consciousness and can navigate between these two worlds, Janie gains her voice. She speaks herself free by signifying upon, or playing the dozens upon, her second husband Joe's manhood by implying that he is impotent in front of all of his friends, a very cold moment in the history of the Negro.
Reducing a nation within a nation (which as of 2021 was about forty-seven million people), more than half of them female, to one identity, "Black," Hurston argues, is to obscure the sheer complexity of the Black experience, indeed, of the human experience itself. Hurston is asking Black people to decide if their identities are more complicated than the fact of their color. Ralph Ellison, echoing Hurston in his great novel Invisible Man, has his protagonist ask: "Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility....
Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?-diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states....
Our fate is to become one, and yet many — This is not prophecy, but description." I Hurston would have African Americans ask themselves, Is all of my being, is the complex and marvelous individual that I am, capable of being boiled down to one among many of my identities, that fact of race? She would ask every African American to ask themselves, Is that one identity, of all your identities, what you want on your tombstone: Here lies an African American?
Hurston's is the voice of multiplicity, the voice of the privilege to embrace diversity, within diversity; the voice for allowing every individual within a minority group, be it based on ethnicity, religion, or gender, to express their individuality, their personalities, in whatever idiosyncratic way they choose. Hurston is also the novelist who finally understood-just as Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown saw in poetry-that the wellspring of a great tradition in African American fiction could be forged out of the language of the people, the language of the Black masses; that it didn't need to be "refined" or
"cleaned up" or "mutated" into classical European forms to be "presentable" to the larger American society; that the art forms that the sons and daughters of those who lived in bondage had created were not "an embarrassment to the race"; and, most important, that artistic expression is, first and last, the province of the artist.
Perhaps this contrast between Wright's vision of Blackness as crafted in Native Son and that of Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God helps us to understand why Hurston's brand of lyrical modernism has blossomed so splendidly and profoundly in the work of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Jamaica Kincaid, while Wright's naturalism seems to have found its voice not in contemporary Black fiction, but rather in the rhetorical strategy of Ta-Nehisi Coates's extended essay Between the World and Me (which is the title of a poem written by Wright), and in that stream of hip-hop known as gangsta rap, in language that is direct and polemical, and "in your face" rather than the multilayered, polyvocal language characteristic of great literary art, literary language that signifies on several levels, not just one.
Hurston drew extensively from folklore as well. Sterling Brown hailed Hurston's role in retrieving Negro folklore from those who would denigrate, devalue, or underestimate it: "Miss Hurston is a trained anthropologist, who brings a great zest to both the collecting and the rendering of the 'big old lies' of her native South."[12] In a way, Brown is the link between Hurston and an entire "school" of modernists and postmodernists whose work is constructed, in various ways, on the bedrock of Black folklore and other vernacular forms, especially the way Black people have spoken and continue to speak African American versions of American English. I'm thinking especially of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, though the list of superb writers in this branch of the African American tradition is long and
distinguished, and would have to include Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and a host of other brilliant authors. In other words, an entire branch, or school, of African American literature unfolded from the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown, themselves indebted to the literary experimentation with Black vernacular traditions in the work of James Weldon Johnson, especially God's Trombones, and its predecessor, Jean Toomer's Cane.
In part because of Hurston's efforts to collect Negro folklore, in part because of her experiments with folklore in her novel, both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison articulated the fundamental importance of Black folklore and vernacular to defining and mining a genuine
"Black aesthetic," a theoretical position that Toni Morrison would also embrace and embody in her fiction.”

[Gwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gates describes his choice of a black box metaphor as a "useful analytical tool for thinking about both the nature of the discursive world that people of African descent have created in this country-and how this very world has been seen and not seen from outside of it by people to fathom its workings inside."

Gates effectively uses this metaphor, along with historical and contemporary threads for a colorful and illustrative narrative of individuals struggling to live within as well as outside the boxes designed to contain fear of other.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do we talk about race in America? How do we write about it? What do we say about ourselves when we do so? Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is one of America's pre-eminent scholars of Black life and literature in the United States, and this book (collected of essays based on lectures he gave to his classes at Harvard) is a fine statement on the way in which Black literature has addressed some of the central questions of our nation's life, and why it's important to listen to those different voices.

"The Black Box: Writing the Race" talks about many of the most significant Black writers in American history and how their work relates to one another and how it still speaks to us long after we have read it. From Phillis Wheatley to Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright to Toni Morrison, Gates addresses the varieties of Black life and experience and how that diversity is reflected in the body of work each of these artists (and many others) has produced.

It's a provocative book, full of insights on the evolution of Black thought in America and the many hurdles it has faced from forces outside of the Black community. From Wheatley being forced to write poems on the spot to Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and other "enlightened" thinkers questioning if Black people were even human, the story of Black creativity in America has been a story of struggle. W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote of the dual nature of Black people in American life and of the "veil" separating them from white folks; Gates shows how that barrier has facilitated great Black art even in the face of racial strife and disharmony.

In the end, America wouldn't be true to itself if we ignored the body of Black literary works that exists, multifaceted and non-monolithic in its conceptions of American life. "The Black Box" is a reckoning, yes, but it's also a spotlight on how Black writers, from Charles W. Chesnutt to Colson Whitehead, have held up a mirror to American society. That mirror still exists, despite efforts to block out its effectiveness.

[Frank White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Henry Louis Gates provided a brilliant perspective to the black box analogy that is used to define race. It's a rather broad perception that properly addresses the proverbial elephant in the room as it pertains to racial identity. What is Black? What is African American? What is Afro-American? These questions always arise throughout the topology of race in America.

[niki · Rating 4 out of 5]

“[Mildred Lewis] Rutherford wished for the power to summon the state apparatus to circumscribe the narrative and racism in our country. [Governor Ron] DeSantis has that power and has demonstrated his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided use of state power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s education ideal must take a stand.”

February 2025 non fiction read

[Mark Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think because this book is an adaptation of lectures for Gates’ introductory course on African-American Studies, it lacks the depth of field I was expecting and hoping for. Still, a fine survey, briefly dipping fingers into waters here and there.

[Christi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, The Black Box was interesting and informative. I wouldn't say this book brought any new insights or knowledge that will stay with me, but several of the metaphors weaves throughout will definitely stick with me. Those metaphors helped deepen my understanding of Black history and culture.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gates accomplished in The Black Box what he is typically lauded for in his documentaries and other shows on PBS television in the USA:  an impressive and largely successful mix of a scholarly and a more informal, narrative approach to history.  

The scholarly elements included frequent references to numerous primary and secondary sources of information.  These were carefully acknowledged and marked in the text and in 52 pages of notes at the end of the book. Additionally, there is a 38 page Index which allows readers to follow up on topics after they have completed Black Box should they wish to.

The more informal approach was evidenced by Gates’ use of a direct and highly readable prose. The timely use of quotations by the various individuals he discussed provided depth and context to his arguments.  If anything there were occasions when the quotations were a bit too long, IMHO.

The author merits praise for two other aspects of this book.  First, its organization enhanced its readability.   Chapters were not only focused on specific topics but they were also subdivided into sections.  Thus, it was both very easy to follow and also to stop reading at various points without losing the thrust of where the book was going.

Second, in the book’s Acknowledgements Gates noted that 7 of its chapters were based upon lectures he has been giving for a number of years for an introductory course at Harvard on African American studies. This was evident because of the casual language he used on occasion. Also, he sometimes he asked rhetorical questions as if he were speaking directly to the reader.

Although I have done a fair amount of reading on African American history in recent years, this book provided a lot of insights into the discussions that have gone on amongst various leaders about the nature of the Black experience in the USA. The ways in which well known people like Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, WEB DuBois, James Weldon Johnson and many others thought and argued amongst themselves about how African Americans have coped with and tried to overcome racism are effectively compared and contrasted. There is also a chapter on the differences inherent in the fiction of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston. Additionally, Gates noted the influence which these two seminal authors had on others like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Ta-Neishi Coates. Other well known 20th century African American writers like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin are also discussed in The Black Box.

Overall, I highly recommend this informative and engaging book. Another of Gates’ excellent books which takes a longer historical perspective is Stony the Road.

[Kimberly H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never took a class specific to African American literature as an English major, so this book—adapted from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Harvard course—is part of my effort to change that. Tracing works by American authors from enslavement to 20th-century writers like Hurston and Morrison, it explores how Black authors have written themselves into existence, often fighting for recognition in a world that sought to exclude them. I was especially fascinated by the full story of Phillis Wheatley, the first published Black poet in 1773, whose work had to be validated by the white community to be considered legitimate. A challenging and insightful read.

“What more powerful tool or weapon could be used to fight slavery and the slave trade than the written testimony of those who had been enslaved themselves. Men and women, who, by performing the act of writing, could simultaneously attest to the evils of enslavement and refute the claim that the Africans lacked reason or couldn’t write

“I conceived of the content of the introduction to African-American studies lecture course, out of which most of the chapters of this book grew, as a way of introducing students to the often disregarded fact that Black people have actually been arguing with one another about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century.”

“Indeed, the ability to take an interest in the diversity of experience, to imagine the different ways one might live in the world, is the basis of human empathy. What we owe to each other, and to ourselves, is a shared sense of wonder and awe as we contemplate works of the human imagination across space and time. Works created by people who don’t look like us and who, in so many cases, would be astonished that we know their work and their names. Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways. They are not protected, but betrayed when we turn them into silos with censures. The freedom to write can thrive only if we protect the freedom to read, and to learn, and perhaps the first thing to learn, in these storm-battered times, is that we could all do with more humility. And more humanity.”

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK but nothing special. Per one other three-star review, this is apparently an adaptation of lecture sections for an undergraduate level course by Gates. So, that's why not a lot of depth. Maybe 3.25.

“Whose your Daddy?” about lower-class black dialect, including black character Shine, and “Whose your Momma?” about Yo Mamma riffs both good. That said, this site has a LOT more about “Shine.”

But, one autobiographical item at the front of the book?

I’m not sure if “disconcerting” is the right word, but it’s not far off on the “check that box.” Gates, of mixed ethnicity himself and married to a white woman, asks his white son-in-law if he checked the black box at birth for Gates’ (approximately) 87.5 percent white grandchild. (That said, I remember when Gates discussed his genetic findings on TV. That was what, nearly a decade ago? Genetic tests weren't THAT accurate then, or that precise. And, if it really is something he still mulls on, I'd get retested, were I him.)

I was reminded of nothing so much as Jews, a generation or two ago, older Jews, worried about marrying outside the ethnicity and/or faith. (Have to write it that way.) Is this a similar worry for many blacks of Gates’ generation, even though he did it himself?

I was also disconcerted by Gates expecting the “black” box from his son-in-law, and sil being so …. whatever that he said he did, and did so immediately.

In the chapter “Sellouts vs Race Men” he works back to the background issue, then says that in Brazil, one drop of white blood can let you be white. Really? I read a bio by a current or former black columnist for either the NYT or the Washington Post several years ago. Race relations in Brazil are not anywhere near that simple.

Gates’ concluding chapter is called “Policing the Color Line,” which comes off as having a large dollop of irony, and maybe even a small edge of hypocrisy, given all the above.

[Shana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof Gates has written a framework for understanding the progression of social discourse among mostly American people of African descent on how to self-define, self-advocate and create a common cultural identity in an easy to absorb method that walks us through a timeline of great writers over the past roughly 300 years. He considers the overall metaphor and reality of the Black box as checked on US forms and all the generally racist, but also intending to follow the empowering self-identification word choices as they have evolved from free people of color, to Blacks, to African-American etc all of which highlight the inherent colorism that still poisons the US experience and structural design) thinking behind the words. He considers his granddaughter and her lifelong box checking ahead. He deeply explores the broader cultural identity and how it has boxed in, given structure, and means to solidify Black people in the US and how thinkers and writers from the community have conceptualized, broken away from and reshaped the "black box".
If this is an insight into the syllabus and lectures from one of his courses, I hope he wikl put more courses into book form for the general public.
Few of the biographies were new to me, but weaving them together over time in this discourse was fascinating, particularly Zora Hurston and Richard Wright public exchanges via reviews and the talk around the New Negro.

Ultimately there is of course a wide range of cultural expressions, all valid and all with long roots in this part of the world dating back to the earliest thefts/enslavements Given even the smallest chance to write...

[James R · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an informative, often times challenging, and compelling look into what it means to be be Black and how that has been debated and defined throughout American history by Blacks. Based on lectures Professor Gates delivered in his Harvard classes in African American Studies this way of understanding the experience of being Back in the American caste system though the lens of black writers and their literature was for me an older white man a much appreciated revelation and insight. I've read some of these authors, but having this expanded context in which to think about and appreciate the sometimes hotly contested debates they represented open up my understanding. The metaphor of the black box and what it means to Gates, his family and most importantly to his new granddaughter was incredibly poignant and thought provoking. There were plenty of times I struggled to keep up with the details of Gates' arguments, but the main ideas were clear and valuable. In this worrisome time in which much that seemed like progress now feels threatened, having this context and insight, that many in power would like to have banned and erased, needs to be protected and preserved.

[Lennox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates Jr. maps out the contentious and vast dialogue of black writers over the last few centuries who have attempted to define what it means to be black. His presentation of the varying arguments put forth is illuminating. As a professor, he has a clear grasp on how to contextualize the experiences and backgrounds of the writers he discusses. I found myself enthralled with the nuances he is able to explain and was left with a curiosity and drive to learn more. One book can only scratch the surface of such a complex issue and I appreciated how he chose to dive deeply into a selection of curated voices rather than simply summarize the last few hundred years of black history. I also admired that the people he focuses on embody a wide array of viewpoints and opinions. It was obviously an intentional choice that reinforces his thesis. The comparisons he is able to draw from historic social movements to modern day struggles against anti-black racism gave me hope about the progress we can make. His conclusions were brilliant and beautiful. I found myself deeply moved by the book and would highly recommend it.

[Roger Smitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Black Box Writing the Race gives us an usual book that gives us MORE of what happened to the first (and long) time of the USA. The label uses a word that that many of us don't want to write about race.

The first section of the book is very much different than others books. It's long. And then on the Chapter One goes us to 1761. And it tells us that in 1761 there were almot 5,000,000 black people in "our" country.

And then Chapter 1 gets us going thought some of events that we haven't heard about. The book has
surprizing events that were bad and --- the opposite--to understand the kinds of people we have now.

There are pieces of the book that show bad things in our country then. And there were events that worked to make the Black people could have a life and have a country. This book gives us lots of details and information of living.

Chapter 6 is "Modernism and It's Discontents." I would say that it is the best part of the book.

[Haleh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Black Box" is based on lectures that Henry Louis Gates, Jr, award winning Harvard professor, delivered over the years to his Intro to African American Studies class. I learned a lot from Gates' book about the history of slave narratives, the poet Phyliss Wheatley who had to defend her poetry to a court in the late 1700s because a jury of white men did not believe that a former slave could write poetry, and how writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston resisted the confinement of the "black box" in describing the African American identity and experience.

Gates' research is meticulous and his prose is beautiful. This is not the type of book you can read in one sitting. It is an academic book of essays where you might choose to reflect about what you have read as you finish each chapter. 

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a clarion call for us all. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the teachers we all needed to have. This book is both unsettling and profound, a wake-up call and a reminder of why we need to remember and study our history.

At times I found Gates was a bit too professorial for me. Perhaps that is a reflection on me since it’s been a while since I sat in a lecture hall. He does explain that the chapters emerge from his time in the classroom.

I think this book should be required reading for those in positions of responsibility in business, industry, and schools. Dare I include the halls of power in Florida?

In summary, while at times I found the tone and style of this book rather academic, it is never a bad thing to read a book that is so important, so insightful, and so necessary in these times.

[Chris P · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain experiences that even when studied can never be fully understood unless they are lived such as surviving the holocaust, being a victim of a violent crime, or the experiences of war. The same could be said with trying to understand the touchy subject of race in the United States.
Even though I cannot fully understand what it means to be black in the United States, this book helps me get a glimpse into the complexities and the history of debate they have existed since the very formulation of the idea of race.
In research theories of writing and other cultural artifacts that are associated with that experience, Henry Lewis Gates does an amazing job of painting that picture with all of the nuance that exists.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to challenge their ideas and prejudices and develop more empathy.

[Chris Sulima · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars. I’m a huge fan of Finding Your Roots so I was excited to find this book on the Goodreads challenge list. This was a study of how African Americans have defined themselves and been defined by others throughout American history, particularly through writing. Highlights were the excellent introductory essay that could have stood alone, a thoughtful and relevant conclusion, a chapter about Phillis Wheatley (about whom I didn’t know nearly anything), and a contrast between the philosophies of “Native Son” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (and the rivalry between the two authors). This book was pretty dense and had a lot of quotations and scholarly digressions, which isn’t surprising since it is based on a college course. It was a bit difficult to follow at times, especially on audio.

[Marie-Elise Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates’ The Black Box: Winning the Race left me simultaneously stunned and amazed, both disoriented and centered. The book pulled together so many teachings from my childhood into a coherent narrative, connecting dots in ways that my maternal relatives did not and could not, being much closer to the scholarship Gates critiques. Stories, ideas, and lessons passed down from my grandmother and mother—once fragmented in my memory—suddenly made sense within the context Gates provides. His ability to weave personal history, cultural memory, and broader social analysis into a single, illuminating narrative is extraordinary. Reading it felt like having both a window and a mirror: a way to look outward and inward, seeing the world and myself reflected back. This is a book that challenges, enlightens, and educates.

[Siobhan Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

NYT Notable Books 2024: 5/100

An interesting and well-written account of race identity in the United States. It's wild to me to hear how little has changed in some ways since the Civil Rights movement, but also not shocking at the same time. I'm glad I read this fairly soon after Jonathan Eig's King since it meant that I came to this work with more of a foundation than I had before. Gates' focus on Black writers was a new subject that I knew little about and I found myself constantly surprised by what I was learning. I knew of some of the writers and works that were covered, but many were new to me. I wish that Gates had gone further into modern Black writers, since so many have had major impacts on modern literature.

[Scott Satterwhite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of Gates' work for years, and this book exceeded my expectations. From the discussion about his granddaughter at the beginning, used as a vehicle to discuss what it means to be Black in America, to the last chapter. I have to admit, the last chapter felt more like it was a bonus track from a CD in the 90s. That one piece you weren't expecting, and then all of a sudden started playing. I live in Florida, and the discussion did he had over in the censoring of African-American history of books supposed directly to me and my work. I found this book from the beginning to the end to be fascinating, interesting, and very relevant.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Those of us concerned about the political destiny of the African American people, and who love the brilliance and the beauty of the African American tradition, should, of course, be concerned about the images of Black people circulated in literature and art and music. But first and foremost, we have to fight for the freedom of the artist to create their literary worlds unencumbered by those who would censor art for “political reasons," even when we most disagree with the contours or politics of the artistic world that that artist has created and represented. These lessons, finally, comprise the enormous moral and aesthetic significance of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

[Micebyliz]

Dr. Gates is a wonderful writer. I always learn from his books. Perhaps the Ascension Hospital in Michigan should have some of his books available for the staff? since they don't seem to know that they ought to "treat" everyone equally (that is, WELL) when they come in for care. No matter who they are--a member of the TOPS or not. Or perhaps the Oklahoma Supreme court who judged that the Tulsa massacre survivors do not rate compensation for their losses. Really. Because why? no reason will do. That's like Nazis saying they were just doing their jobs. All of this makes me spit nails.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me this was a nice refresher course from an eminent scholar, with a few bits new to me, or forgotten and need to be recalled. Basically a call for continued study and writing about African American history and its necessity in telling the complete story of my country (warts and all), regardless of what the emerging white supremacist movement wants. And really, that goes for any parts of our historical experience that point out the errors and terrible parts, from as many voices and perspectives as can be brought to bear.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, incredibly easy to read for such a complex topic. It’s a collection of essays but it does feel like a full book with the essays being connected based on the topics and very little information being repeated. I loved all the insights into “selling out” and how there’s no one right way to be black, I think that last idea can also be applied to other minority groups like how there’s no one way to be queer or to be a woman, you just have to live your own experience and try to remain authentic to yourself. Masterfully written, highly recommend!