The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Blackness is a veritable repository of African American historical meta-identity, a box containing a long list of connotations, significations, stereotypes, folklore, myths, jokes, boasts, assumptions, predispositions, and counterclaims.

The moral of the class, and of this book, is that there never has been one way to be Black; that African Americans are as varied and as complex in their political and religious beliefs, let’s say, and in their cultural and religious practices as any other people are.

Too often, we talk about “the Black community” like it’s a village composed of a unitary group, one with shared experiences and unified concerns and views. But there are as many ways of being Black as there are Black people.

“Blackness” was an arbitrary category invented by Europeans and Americans in the Enlightenment to justify the horror show of Black subjugation.

the very concept of “race” is the child of racism; it is the figurative black box in which people of African descent were, and continue to be, confined, so as to justify the caste subordination manifesting itself in the Big Bang of the transatlantic slave trade, which oiled the emerging international capitalist network. But at the same time, these devalued human beings had to make a home within this box and claim their humanity within that cruelly delimited, claustrophobic space, in no small part at first by playing the Enlightenment’s game of using the master’s tools—what we might think of as the “literacy of writing”—to inscribe themselves into the discursive arena, and then increasingly finding their own autonomous space within which their own conversations became interior ones, written for and directed to the community itself, but that also interacted with the larger culture where power needed to be claimed, or at least the attempt to claim power most urgently needed to be made.

For every complex problem, H. L. Mencken famously said, there’s a solution that’s simple, appealing,…and wrong.

Writing and language were key in the formation of this nation within a nation. Placed on the defensive by European and American philosophers, Black people fought back in various ways, and in fighting back, they planted the seeds of a shared history, a shared culture.

Hume knew that Black people could read and write; that they were intelligent, articulate, sophisticated, and aristocratic. But he chose to ignore the evidence, not even mentioning the great Black sixteenth-century university in Timbuktu. Consciously or unconsciously, Hume created a discourse that we might call “race and reason,” which became a powerful tool in the justification of the eighteenth-century slave trade. All of the major Enlightenment thinkers who wrote about this discourse took their starting point from Hume.

Montesquieu famously opposed slavery in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, but his opposition to the institution did not mean he believed in racial equality. He asserted that those who live near the equator have “distended or relaxed fiber endings” and “no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous sentiment.” Two years later, in an unpublished note, he described the free Black people living in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue as “so naturally lazy that those who are free do nothing.”[17] Saint-Domingue would, of course, become the Republic of Haiti in 1804, the only nation to gain its independence as the result of a successful slave rebellion.

Today, thanks to remarkable developments in genetics research, we know that, scientifically, what we popularly call “race” is a social construct—that all human beings, no matter how different we might seem from one another based on physical traits such as hair texture, facial structure, and skin color, are more than 99 percent identical genetically.

Cultural characteristics have come to be accepted as biological; as scientific, essential, and unalterable; as “natural.”

The preference for light over dark—strictly speaking, white over Black—was derived [in part] from pre-Medieval associations of white with purity and virtue, and of Black with impurity and evil.”

In the United States specifically, it’s easy to see that for African Americans, the most damaging of the works of these Enlightenment philosophers were the arguments made by Thomas Jefferson about the nature of enslaved Black people (not forgetting his outrageous speculation about the sexual relations between orangutans and African women on the African continent). The reason should be self-evident: along with Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson was the American embodiment of the Enlightenment, and he penned the words that “all men are created equal”—which he clearly did not believe, judging by these scandalous assertions in Notes on the State of Virginia.

Whether they wanted to be or not, these Black authors were engaged in—one could say trapped in, forced into—a complex act of “representing,” functioning as synecdoches for the race. Frederick Douglass understood this, referring to himself as “the ‘representative’ of the ‘black race.’ ”[29] Phillis Wheatley was the Negro, the African. One solitary and quite vulnerable individual was made to stand for, or represent, the entire group—in this case, an entire continent of human beings.

Black people fought back against the discourse of race and reason by creating their own genre of literature, which today we call the slave narratives. Again, writing was the key. Enslavers knew this. A person who could write could demand their rights and organize to do so. 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, which had been passed in response to the Stono Rebellion slave uprising of the previous year. Many enslaved people who were freed or who escaped to the North equated freedom with literacy.

The trope of the talking book is the scene of education in all slave narratives in which a book “speaks” to the enslaved person. In this moment is the first step toward education, freedom, and, in a word, enlightenment. It is an allegory that refutes the anti-Black racist discourse that we saw in Hume and Kant and Jefferson.

We are all endowed “with the same faculties,” Banneker continued, and “however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family.” He threw Jefferson’s own words at him, citing the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. “But, Sir,” Banneker wrote, “how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.”

“No body wishes more than I do,” he replied, “to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

Walker began by quoting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, to refute the claims that Jefferson himself made about Blacks in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us,” he declared, “we will only establish them.”

Second, Walker maintained that Black people themselves must establish a literature, a discourse, that refutes pro-slavery arguments: “For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves, according to their chance…. [O]ur oppression ought not to hinder us from acquiring all [of the learning and knowledge] we can,” for one day, when freedom belongs to all Black people, “then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.”

I was still in high school when Negroes became Black people in the middle of the 1960s. When I applied to Yale in 1969, on my personal statement, I wrote, “My grandfather was colored, my father is a Negro, and I am Black!” The person probably most responsible for this transformation, after Malcolm X, was Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Carmichael enunciated the political philosophy of Black Power during the James Meredith “March Against Fear” on June 16, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi. We were Black pretty much across the board for those two decades, until about 1988, when Jesse Jackson declared at a press conference that we were African Americans now.[1] Most of us have been African Americans since that time.

Fewer than twenty thousand African Americans voluntarily shipped themselves back to Africa. In comparison, historians estimate that about twenty-five thousand enslaved people were able to escape to the North on the Underground Railroad. Both of these figures represent a tiny percentage of the African American community. Most Black people could never break the bonds of slavery.

“Words are used as the signs of our ideas, and whenever they perform this office, or are truly significant of the ideas for which they stand, they accomplish the object of their invention,” wrote William Watkins

Enslaved people recognized the importance of naming. 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. Knowing the identities and names of one’s ancestors, especially one’s father and mother, was of great importance, too—and considering the abomination of family separation, not something to be taken for granted. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington noted that there were two things “practically all” formerly enslaved people did after Emancipation: change their name in some way, even if it meant just adding a middle initial, which they called their “entitles”; and walk off the plantation on which they had been held in bondage, even if the only thing they did was to turn around and walk back.

Douglass’s signature chiasmus appears at the structural center of his brilliantly crafted narrative: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

A large part of it was aimed at what might be called the valorization of the mother, or the recuperation of the dignity of Black women, who were depicted in the broader popular culture either as light-skinned, hypersexualized Jezebels at one extreme or as dark-skinned, unattractively obese mammies at the other. These two stereotypes of Black women remain with us today—another binary such as we saw with Frederick Douglass’s multiple versions of his autobiography. It is no accident that the first Black woman to receive an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel for her role as “Mammy” (she had no other name) in Gone with the Wind, a Hollywood fantasy of the love that the Black house slaves had for their white masters. Drawing on George Frederickson’s term, Higginbotham calls this “romantic racialism.”

The mammy was crucial to this media campaign. The original Aunt Jemima, Mammy was the safe, grandmotherly type of Black woman, someone who was imagined to love her white enslaver’s children more than she loved her own. The image romanticized slavery, stripped it of its brutality toward women (beatings, sexual exploitation, rape), and fabricated nostalgia. This was all happening precisely as white people were sanitizing memories of the Civil War: it was, after all, no longer recalled as “the war to end slavery” but as a war over states’ rights.

At the same time, within the African American community, another discourse was unfolding underground, the voice of the Black lower classes, the great mass of Black people who most certainly were not New Negroes. We call this “the politics of disrespectability.” In contrast to the politics of respectability, the politics of disrespectability was a culturally private discourse; an intraracial discourse; a Black-on-Black form of art not intended for white people to hear. (Remember the black box metaphor, the idea that what is on the inside is hidden from and possibly unfathomable to those on the outside.) It embraced folk, vernacular, or lower-class values. It used scandalous language and profanity. It made New Negroes blush. And because it was scandalous, it had to be contained or hidden from the view of the larger American public, if not eliminated from Black cultural practices entirely. The politics of disrespectability was also an antireligious discourse, some would say in league with the devil. Much of it depended on the denigration of the mother, even of her sexualization. These parallel cultural and textual universes are both Black, one unfolding in public in front of white people, the other on the street, in the ’hood, for the consumption of Black people alone. And these two realms of cultural discourse unfolded in parallel universes with their own traditions, unconsciously, side by side, or aboveground and underground. They are the yin and yang of the African America...

after risking their lives and take Jim Crow racism lying down? To the socialists, led by A. Philip Randolph, the New Negro was a warrior: “to fight

Art has never liberated a people. Shakespeare’s creative output was supported by the economic and political power of Elizabethan England, which followed England’s stunning victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Hamlet didn’t liberate England; England, you might say, liberated Shakespeare and Hamlet. Pushkin emerged from the stability and prosperity produced by Peter the Great, the very same emperor who purchased and enslaved Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, then freed him and made him a general.

Those of us concerned about the political destiny of the African American people, and who love the brilliance and the beauty of the African American tradition, should, of course, be concerned about the images of Black people circulated in literature and art and music. But first and foremost, we have to fight for the freedom of the artist to create their literary worlds unencumbered by those who would censor art for “political reasons,” even when we most disagree with the contours or politics of the artistic world that that artist has created and represented.

I assumed that with knowledge, sacrifice would automatically follow. In my youth and idealism, I did not realize that selfishness is even more natural than sacrifice….

As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.”[14]

Any teacher, any student, any reader, any writer, sufficiently attentive and motivated, must be able to engage freely with whatever subjects they choose. That is not only the essence of education; it’s the essence of being human.

Du Bois never let anyone tell him to stay in his lane. When he needed to, he paved his own. As a lifelong dissident, he also knew that liberation was not secured by filtering out dissident voices; courage, not comfort, was his ideal.

What we owe to each other, and to ourselves, is a shared sense of wonder and awe as we contemplate works of the human imagination across space and time, works created by people who don’t look like us and who, in so many cases, would be astonished that we know their work and their names. Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways; they are not protected but betrayed when we turn them into silos with sentries. The freedom to write can thrive only if we protect the freedom to read—and to learn. And perhaps the first thing to learn, in these storm-battered times, is that we could all do with more humility, and more humanity.