Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr’s legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box – 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 & 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 liveable world, a “home”, for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society. This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. 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 & speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of and resisted confinement in, the black box that this “nation within a nation” has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
