The Black Box : Writing the Race

A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves over the course of the country's history. 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 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 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 dis