Gates adroitly demonstrates how literature served as a site of self-interrogation and a pathway to liberation.

Searching.

This gem brilliantly reflects multiple depictions of what it means to be a Black American amid complex, structured interracial and color-based discrimination discourses, in which writing and language are keys..

The Black Box requires that readers rethink the ways we talk about race in America today. Gates’ passionate and compelling prose, and the book’s lucid details and insights, lay the historical and artistic groundwork for such conversations..

A consistent strength of the book is Gates’ incisive descriptions of the debates arising from efforts to define personal and collective identities and chart paths to freedom.