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THE BLACK BOX OF RACE  
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
March 16, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly
reinvented themselves. _

, Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic.

 

My daughter Maggie gave birth to Ellie, my granddaughter, by
C‑section on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2014. That evening,
my son‑in‑law, Aaron, came over for a warm hug and a celebratory
shot of bourbon. I listened to Aaron’s play‑by‑play of the
events, and after a decent pause, I asked the question that I had
wanted to ask all along:

“Did you check the box?”

Without missing a beat, my good son‑in‑law responded, “Yes, sir.
I did.”

“Very good,” I responded, as I poured a second shot.

Aaron, a young white man, had checked the “Black” box on the form
that Americans are required to complete at the time of the birth of a
child.

Now, my daughter’s father’s admixture—in other words, mine—is
50 percent sub‑Saharan African and 50 percent European, according to
DNA tests. My son‑in‑law is 100 percent European. Because Maggie
is 75 percent European, Ellie will test about 87.5 percent European
when she spits in the test tube.

Eleanor Margaret Gates‑Hatley, who looks like an adorable little
white girl, will live her life as a “Black” person, because her
father and mother checked the “Black” box. That choice will define
so very many of Ellie’s encounters with the world—from how her
college application is read to how her physician assesses her risks
for certain medical conditions. And she will be destined, throughout
her life, to face the challenge of “proving” that she is
“Black,” simply because her self‑styled “race man”
grandfather ardently—and perhaps foolishly—wished for her racial
self to be socially constructed that way.

Such is the absurdity of the history of race and racial designations
in the United States, stemming from “the law of hypodescent,” the
proverbial “one‑drop rule.” Perhaps Eleanor will choose to dance
the dance of racial indeterminacy, moving effortlessly back and forth
across the color line. Or maybe she will claim a social identity that
reflects her European ancestry. Or maybe she will keep a photograph of
her grandfather in her pocketbook and delight in refuting—or
affirming, as the case may be—the laughable, tragic arbitrariness of
the social construction of race in America. The most important thing
is that this be her choice.

The “black box” has become a powerful symbol for me. In the event
of a plane crash, of course, the black box is what survives—a record
of the truth amid disastrous circumstances. The black box is something
you can’t see inside—it has inputs and outputs, but its internal
workings are not comprehendible. Above all it is a metaphor for the
circumscribed universe within which people of African descent have
been forced to construct a new identity on this side of the Atlantic.

The Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter defined his own box in this
way:

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. So, I
live in a box, not of my own making, and on the box is a label, not of
my own choosing. Most of those who have not met me, and many of those
who have, see the box and read the label and imagine they have seen
me.

In Carter’s usage, the black box is a place of identity confinement
through predefinition, akin to the late literary critic Barbara
Johnson’s definition of a stereotype as “an already read text.”
The Black face enters the room, and at a glimpse, the viewer knows all
that they need to know about the person wearing the mask_ _of
Blackness. Good luck, Carter is suggesting, shedding any of those
connotations.

And yet a great portion of the history of African Americans consists
of the marvelous and ingenious means by which they have navigated
their way in and out of the box in which they’ve been confined.

Perhaps the first black box was the definition of Africa as “the
Dark Continent,” a metaphor for the color of its inhabitants’ skin
as well as for their supposed benightedness. This metaphor was used to
justify the second, even crueler black box, within which people of
African descent found themselves placed by Europeans—the dreadful
transatlantic slave trade, responsible for perhaps the largest forced
migration in human history. It was the repository of all the racist
stereotypes employed to justify the enslavement of a continent of
human beings and then, subsequent to the abolition of slavery, to
justify the rollback of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow
segregation.

The author Henry Box Brown literalized this trope by escaping from
slavery in 1849 by being shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia in a
box measuring three feet, one inch long; two feet, six inches high;
and two feet wide. The box was labeled this side up to keep Brown
upright, but the instruction was often ignored, meaning Brown spent
hours of his trip upside down, drinking water from a beef bladder and
breathing through three drilled holes.

But the black box was also, somehow, a place of creativity, a
universe of culture mysteriously and inexplicably produced, and often
unintelligible to those outside it. Frederick Douglass recognized
this
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he mused about the “Sorrow Songs”—spirituals composed by
enslaved men and women. “They would make the dense old woods, for
miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the
highest joy and the deepest sadness.” These songs were composed in
code, music set “to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon,
but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.”
Douglass himself confessed he did not understand: “They told a tale
of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.”

In 1884, this magazine published a long article called “The Negro
Problem,
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by the Harvard professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a paleontologist
and geologist as well as a strong proponent of scientific racism and
eugenics. Shaler’s white-supremacist discourse fell squarely into
the school of thought imposed on the Black community that was used
well into the 20th century to justify the eradication of rights gained
by African Americans during Reconstruction. Thirteen years later, also
in this magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Being a problem is a
strange experience.” His essay, “Strivings of the Negro People
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(which he would revise slightly for his 1903 book, _The Souls of
Black Folk_), described the “Negro Problem” label as a kind of
black box:

The ‘shades of the prison-house’ closed round about us all: walls
strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and
unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly against the stone, or
steadily, half hopelessly watch the streak of blue above.

(The writers of these two _Atlantic _essays knew each other: Shaler
was Du Bois’s professor at Harvard. Perhaps paradoxically, Du Bois
expressed gratitude to Shaler for defending his presence in class
against the protests of a southern student.)

It was to free himself and the race from the bounds of this box that
Du Bois and many others wrote and spoke so prolifically, addressing
the subject again and again. For Ralph Ellison, in _Invisible Man_,
the black box is both a boxing ring in which two blindfolded Black
boys are forced to beat each other senseless and also the hole in
which Ellison’s protagonist hides from a world that seeks to impose
upon him its masks of identity, where he types the manuscript that we
eventually are surprised to learn we are reading over his shoulder.

But being doomed to fight against racism could also be a trap. As Du
Bois’s fellow Harvard graduate and sometime ideological foe, the
philosopher Alain Locke, put it
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“the thinking Negro” inside a black box forged “in the mind of
America” is forced “to see himself in the distorted perspective of
a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him
than his personality.”

More recently, Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Blue Seuss” explores
the metaphor of the black box. It begins:

Blacks in one box
Blacks in two box
Blacks on
Blacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxes
Blacks in boxes stacked on shores
Blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness
Blacks in boxes do not float
Blacks in boxes count their losses

And ends:

Blacks in voting booths are
Blacks in boxes
Blacks beside
Blacks in rows of houses are Blacks in boxes too

As a professor, I try to teach my students about how Black people have
sought to escape from this box. But even more important, I endeavor to
expose them to the long tradition of Black discourse, and the often
disregarded fact that Black people have been arguing with one another
about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their
thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the 18th century.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to insert himself
into the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for
example, even—or especially—several of his fellow leaders of the
civil-rights movement told him that he was out of bounds, demanding
that he redirect his concerns to issues relevant to those doomed to
dwell within the black box, advice that the good reverend boldly
ignored.

The moral 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 as any other group. And they have voiced those
internal differences with great fervor and passion, stunning
eloquence, and vehemence, often even subjecting those Black thinkers
with whom they disagree to the nastiest and pettiest ad hominem
attacks.

These debates within and about the African American tradition have for
too long been opaque to most Americans, in the same way that the songs
of his enslaved sisters and brothers remained opaque to Frederick
Douglass. Too often, we talk about “the Black community” as if it
were a village composed of a unitary group, one with shared
experiences and unified views. Reflecting on what binds Black
Americans together and on what distinguishes individuals and
subcultures within that tradition has never been more crucial than at
this contested and polarized moment, with its focus on identity and
identity politics, and Americans’ lazy predisposition to think of
every group as monolithic.

But the tradition of Black thought is most correctly described as a
series of contentions, many of them fiery ones. And fire, as the
greatest Black intellectuals have always known, can generate light as
well as heat.

The “right” answer about how to escape the black box has never
been formulated, precisely because there never has been, and never
will be, _one right answer _to that haunting question.

Consider this paradox: The very concept of “race” is the child
of _racism. _“Blackness” was an arbitrary category invented by
Europeans and Americans in the Enlightenment to justify the horror
show of Black subjugation. The human beings who suddenly became
“Black” were then forced to play a complex game of
“representation” to claim some space in the world, and that vexed
process evolved into a rich legacy of self‑definition within this
diverse community composed of every type of person living on the
planet Earth—some 50 million of them in this country
alone—connected by their relationship to this proverbial black box,
a metaphysical construct invented to justify an economic order in
which their selfhood could be objectified, their subjectivity robbed,
and their labor stolen.

They created this legacy of self-definition, in no small part, by
using the master’s tool: writing.

During the Enlightenment, Black authors such as Ignatius Sancho, John
Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano managed to forge successful careers
against all the odds. Others were less fortunate. Despite her
unprecedented fame, the poet Phillis Wheatley died in obscurity and
poverty in 1784. Jacobus Capitein, a formerly enslaved man from the
Gold Coast, defended his doctoral dissertation (which argued that the
Bible did not oppose slavery) at the University of Leiden in 1742. He
returned home, founded a school, and, after falling from Dutch grace,
was buried in an unmarked grave. We can begin to understand how he was
seen by his contemporaries through the words a fellow student at
Leiden inscribed in the foreword to Capitein’s dissertation: “See
this Moor, his skin is black, but white his soul … He will bring
faith, hope and love to the Africans, so they will, whitened, honour
the Lamb.”

The small, elite group of Black intellectuals wrote very few words
about the matter of their “Blackness” in a world still wrestling
with who and what they were, and what the relation between
“Blackness” and “whiteness” could possibly be in European
economies defined by the trade in Black human beings. No matter how
brilliant an individual of color might be, no matter how much fame,
respect, or financial success he might achieve, he was standing on a
trap door.

Thus was the fate of Angelo Soliman.

Soliman was born around 1721, likely in what is now Nigeria. According
to the scholars Iris Wigger and Spencer Hadley, he was stolen from his
family as a child and forced into slavery in Italy, where he became
the property of the imperial governor of Sicily, Count Lobkowitz. When
the count died, Soliman became a servant to a prince in Vienna,
dressed in exotic styles as a so‑called court Moor. The prince
dismissed Soliman when, without permission, he married an aristocratic
widow. Nevertheless, Soliman’s stature only increased, and his black
box began to crack open.

He continued to move in aristocratic circles, rejoined the royal court
as an educator under the prince’s successor, and joined a Masonic
lodge that counted Mozart and Haydn among its members. Soliman became
the grand master of this lodge and gave its rituals a more scholarly
bent, so much so that he is still celebrated in Masonic lore as
Angelus Solimanus, the “Father of Pure Masonic Thought.” He spoke
multiple languages. He may well have been the most prominent Black
person in Europe at the time.

In death none of this mattered. Soliman died on November 21, 1796.
Despite the pleas of his daughter, Josephine, Soliman would not
receive a proper Christian burial. Instead, his body fell into the
hands of the director of the Royal Natural History Collection, Abbé
Simon Eberlé, who had hatched his heinous plan while Soliman was
still alive, petitioning the government for the “cession of the
corpse.” What followed was horrific.

As Wigger and Hadley write, Eberlé “ordered a death mask to be
created before Soliman’s skin was removed and prepared for
exhibition with a stuffing compound. The so created figure was then
dressed up as a ‘savage’ in a loin cloth, with an ostrich feather
crown and glass beads, and presented to the public in the midst of
taxidermised exotic animals.”

In the ultimate humiliation, Soliman was placed on display at the
museum, a debased artifact trapped behind glass. As late as 1806, this
perverse specter of European primitivism and anti‑Black racism was
still proudly on display—a literal realization of permanent
suspension in a black box. Eventually it was moved to a warehouse,
which burned in the October Revolution of 1848.

The quest for culture and individual identity in the face of such
history is an argument without end. Like all truly great arguments, it
is a story of ceaseless creativity and reinvention, without which any
attempt to understand America is not just incomplete but absurd.

_This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book_ The Black Box:
Writing the Race [[link removed]]_. Buy
Book.
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_HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.  is an American literary critic
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and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher
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Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research
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University [[link removed]]. He is a
trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
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rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has
published extensively on the recognition of African-American
literature
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of the Western canon [[link removed]]._

_In addition to producing and hosting previous series on the history
and genealogy of prominent American figures, since 2012, Gates has
been host of the television series Finding Your Roots
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expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in
genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their
ancestors._

* Black History
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