
The Black Box
Writing the Race
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Narrated by:
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Dominic Hoffman
About this listen
A New York Times Notable Book
“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 Times
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 one another, 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 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 group formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal subhuman bondage transformed itself through the word into a community joined in overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture of people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be Black, and about how best to use the past to create 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.
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Critic reviews
“The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. 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.”—Tope Folarin, The New York Times
“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, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“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.”—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
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-
The Message
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.
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Bias
- By Dana on 10-13-24
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Theoretical Black Box Perspective
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Excellent book!
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Another outstanding Henry Loius Gates, Jr. history producion
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What every American should know
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Unbiased!
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Comprehensive, Historic and Relevant
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Growth through learning
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The Best Book I listened to in 2024
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