The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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...