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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Will Johnnie Veal—convicted of the murder of two police officers in 1970—be granted parole after 50 years in prison? How can he convince the parole board he’s reformed when he insists he’s innocent? What is prison time even supposed to accomplish? These are the questions that propel The Parole Room forward as it builds toward Johnnie’s 20th parole hearing—after 19 rejections.
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Well done
- By Cynthia Duncan on 10-13-24
By: Ben Austen
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What listeners say about The Black Box
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Frank White
- 04-29-24
The Theoretical Black Box Perspective
Dr. Henry Louis Gates provided a brilliant perspective to the black box analogy that is used to define race. It's a rather broad perception that properly addresses the proverbial elephant in the room as it pertains to racial identity. What is Black? What is African American? What is Afro-American? These questions always arise throughout the topology of race in America.
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- melissa
- 06-22-24
Another outstanding Henry Loius Gates, Jr. history producion
An excellent discussion of the roots of the Black American caste system. The text is a superb weaving of literature and orature from America's Black elite that exposes their fears and rejections of "the other side" of themselves and how the neuroses generated in slavery and captivity causes continued intraracial separation. I am on my second listening of the text and am glad I purchased the book for future reference. Bravo, Dr. Gates.
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- Frank Woods
- 04-13-24
What every American should know
Whether one dislikes or is enthused about what history is should know it without boundaries. Thank you, Dr. Gates
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- kj
- 04-12-24
Unbiased!
Eye opening and a positive challenge to America to deal with differences, biases, and our future!
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- ASmith
- 04-22-24
Comprehensive, Historic and Relevant
This book is so well written. The research is stellar, the composition is compelling and the performance is excellent.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-17-24
Growth through learning
Never disappointed in learning more about the history od my people. Should be required reading for everyone!
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- Kindle Customer
- 04-30-24
The Best Book I listened to in 2024
Dis-like: Not a Thing. I recommend this Book to the Public, who ever wants to know the Truth about Life.
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