The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.”— Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste“This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.” —The New York TimesA 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 Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of t