The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.