Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

Meta’s oversight body prepares to lay off workers

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Election 2024 latest news: Trump, Biden returning to campaign trail this week

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Tensions grow between Trump and Lake in Arizona race for Senate 

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

As U.S. rushes to send military aid, Ukrainians applaud lobbying effort

An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

Scotland leader Humza Yousaf resigns in latest setback for independence 

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

The Fed’s fight against inflation needs to lose the dot plot

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

Ask Amy: Boyfriend’s CPA dad did my taxes wrong for years

Miss Manners: I think kindergarten graduations are ‘ridiculous’

Carolyn Hax: Is checking his phone the best way to prove he isn’t lying anymore?

Middle East conflict live updates: Britain urges Hamas to accept ‘very generous’ 40-day Gaza cease-fire deal

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

The Rangers swept the Capitals, and it’s time for the new core to take charge

The new face of flooding

Where seas are rising at alarming speed 

Red carpet looks from the White House correspondents’ dinner

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

Chiropractor works on giraffe, is nuzzled: ‘Giraffes are just giant dogs?’

An SUV was in flames on the highway. Strangers saved the driver.  

 Donald Trump Speaks During A Campaign Rally In Green Bay Wisconsin

Penguin Press 

If Black Americans have often found themselves trapped in the language of their White oppressors, then a literature of their own making has often served as a means of escape. So proposes the legendary Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his searching new book, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3PMYmld" target=_blank>The Black Box: Writing the Race</a>.”

The seven chapters that make up “The Black Box” are revised versions of lectures that Gates has delivered in the Introduction to African American Studies course he has been teaching at Harvard for decades. Together, they provide an incisive and informative overview of the Black American literary and intellectual tradition from the 1700s to the middle of the 20th century. While they contain little information that would surprise an expert — indeed, any self-respecting connoisseur is no doubt already familiar with Gates’s pioneering academic work on the subject — these reflections are elegant entrees into the debates that Black Americans have conducted in their long quest for self-definition.

“The Black Box” succeeds not because it contains novel facts but because Gates’s gloss on the established history glimmers. He proposes that it is by narrating and naming — that is, by writing — that Black Americans have shattered the narrow boxes in which they have so often been imprisoned. By writing about this writing, he, too, pens his way free.

The “black box” of Gates’s title has many meanings. One of them is literal: The professor was pleased to hear that his son-in-law, a White man, and his daughter, who is “75 percent European,” checked “the ‘Black’ box on the form that Americans are required to complete at the time of the birth of a child.” His granddaughter, Ellie, may look White, and she may “test about 87.5% European when she spits in the test tube,” but Blackness is an indelible part of her heritage.

Stephanie Berger

Race has never been a biological matter, anyway, and the choice to categorize Ellie as Black functions as a recognition of what Gates describes as “the sheer, laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America,” a country where Blackness has been chronically mischaracterized by exploiters and enslavers. White Americans have fashioned many bitter boxes for their compatriots of color throughout the centuries: American heirs to the European Enlightenment (among them Thomas Jefferson) insisted that Black people were intellectually inferior by nature, while enslavers in the antebellum South enforced the notorious “one-drop rule,” according to which a person with even a single drop of Black blood counted as Black for legal purposes. The point of this principle, Gates explains, was unspeakably awful: It enabled White men to enslave the children they fathered by raping the Black women they owned.

Of course, Black people in America have endured many literal confinements. During the Middle Passage, they languished in inhumane conditions in the holds of slave ships, “another circumscribed enclosure, another black box of sorts.” Today, they are the primary victims of mass incarceration. Even the path to liberation has often involved small, cramped spaces. Gates reports that one fugitive, Henry Box Brown, went so far as to stage his 1849 escape from slavery “by being shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia in a box measuring three feet one inch long, two feet six inches high, and two feet wide.”

But this book focuses less on physical entrapment and more on the black box of categorization, or, as Gates puts it, “the legacy of self-definition over the long course of Black intellectual history since the eighteenth century.” “The black box is a place of identity confinement through predefinition,” as he writes, but it has also been a site of great creativity.

Take Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved 18th-century poet who published her first verses when she was only a teenager. Though bigots of the period were convinced that rationality was a hallmark of humanity and an exclusively White endowment, Wheatley combated the “pernicious discourse of race and reason” by demonstrating her prodigious intellect and artistry. As Gates concludes, she and many of her Black contemporaries “wrote books, and by doing so, they wrote themselves and their fellow people of African descent into the human community.”

So-called slave narratives that appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries served a similar function. Not only did they facilitate self-expression, they also refuted the entrenched notion that Black people were inhuman because they were illiterate. There was a reason that “writing was seen as such a powerful act that enslaved Black people were prohibited from learning how to as part of South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740.”

On the one hand, language can accomplish only so much. “Art has never liberated a people,” Gates concedes in his discussion of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black literary movement that exploded onto the American scene in the 1920s and ’30s. On the other hand, the power to describe oneself is intimately bound up with the power to shape one’s own life. Newly freed enslaved people almost always changed their names, because, as Gates notes, “naming oneself, protecting that name from generation to generation, and quite possibly protecting oneself from slave catchers, was an assertion of one’s humanity and individuality.”

Collective naming would prove to be no less important — although it would also prove much more contentious. In the early 1800s, some Black people defended the then-common word “colored,” whereas others proposed stranger terms, such as “Africamerican.” (“The suggestion is as absurd as the sound of the name is inharmonious,” one cantankerous dissenter complained.) The prominent Black businessman and abolitionist William Whipper, who argued that all “racial terminology … validated racial hierarchies and white supremacy,” championed the radical (and ultimately impractical) idea of dispensing with a designation altogether. Others rightly wondered: “How would Black reformers reach any practical goal without the explicit acknowledgment of racial discrimination?”

The challenge was to find a name for Black people that did not risk entrapping them in essentialization. This is a challenge that Gates also tackles head on. As he writes in his introduction, many of his lectures grew out of his desire to apprise students of “the often disregarded fact that Black people have actually been arguing with each other about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century.” “The Black Box” is a testament to the vigorous disputes that have always roiled the Black community — or, more aptly, the Black communities, since there has never been only one.

In the early 19th century, Black Americans fought acrimoniously over whether to return to Africa, a continent many of them had never known, or remain in a perhaps irredeemably hostile United States. “Our claims are on America; it is the land that gave us birth,” wrote a Black tailor named Thomas L. Jennings in the country’s first Black newspaper in 1828, but members of the American Colonization Society begged to differ. Ultimately, Gates reports, a very small percentage of African Americans, fewer than 20,000, voluntarily returned to Africa. In the late 1800s, the clash of the moment centered on a different question: whether to assimilate by conforming to White bourgeois values, or whether to celebrate “folk, vernacular, or lower-class values” and uniquely Black cultural forms.

Although “The Black Box” is a work of history, many of the debates it chronicles persist to the present day. We are still asking whether there is a way of discussing the injustices faced by people of color without homogenizing diverse communities or reinforcing senseless and cruelly wielded categories; we are still asking whether America can be salvaged; and we are still asking — we will probably always be asking — what Blackness really consists in.

Gates’s answer is that there is no single answer. He is partial to the image of the black box in large part because it is rich with resonances. A black box is a device of literal and metaphorical internment; it is also an instrument of categorization on census forms and official papers; and it is an insoluble mystery, a contraption that works for reasons destined to remain opaque. Blackness in America is as polysemic as the bottomless box. “If there are forty-seven million Black people in America,” Gates writes, “that means there are forty-seven million ways ‘legitimately’ to be Black.” This is a box that can and should never be closed.

<i>Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”</i>

Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, 2022

Finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, 2018

Finalist for a National Magazine Award, 2017

Finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, 2016

Dartmouth College, BA in philosophy and German

University of Cambridge, MPhil in history and philosophy of science

Harvard University, ABD, PhD in philosophy

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at Book World. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2024. 

Becca Rothfeld

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ‘Black Box’ brings readers into his classroom 

the-washington-post

book world handout

Book Reviews

Fiction

Nonfiction

April books

50 notable fiction books

Books

washpost

prism://prism.query/site,/entertainment/books&limit=10

Book reviews and news about new books, best sellers, authors, literature, biographies, memoirs, children's books, fiction, non-fiction and more. Search Washington, DC area books events, reviews and bookstores from the Washington Post.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. brings readers into his classroom

In ‘The Black Box,’ Gates shares versions of lectures that he has delivered in a Harvard course for decades