How Black Americans found their voice
THE BLACK BOX Writing the race
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR 304pp. Allen Lane. £25.
WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON asserted that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, it is unlikely that he had individual equality in mind. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr explains in The Black Box: Writing the race, the founding father’s “objections” to African Americans were “political … physical and moral”. In step with many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, including Immanuel Kant and David Hume, Jefferson invoked the pseudoscience of race to argue that colour signified what Gates calls “immutable differences in character, intelligence, and culture”. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson concluded that people of African descent “in memory … are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior”, adding: “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”.
The Black Box, drawing on Gates’s lectures from his long-running introduction to African American studies at Harvard University, focuses on the strategies of self-definition employed by Black American writers from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century as they have sought to escape what he describes as “the sheer, laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America”. Beginning with an account of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first volume of poetry by an African American to be published, Gates underscores how writing in Black American culture has always been a political act, a rebuttal to specious Enlightenment claims that justified slavery on the basis that people of African descent could not write – and were hence intellectually inferior. In 1773, the same year in which Wheatley’s volume of poetry was published, the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences published essays on the source of “Blackness”, concluding that it arose from moral fault and species “degeneration”.
For African Americans, who fought back through literary production, “‘Liberation’ and ‘literacy’ were inextricable”. As Gates points out, slave narratives published during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a direct threat to enslavers, since “A person who could write could demand their rights and organize to do so”. Slave narratives, penned by authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and written when many US states passed laws against teaching slaves to read and write, were not only testimony to the psychic scars endured by their authors, but also a forceful challenge to the institution of slavery. “What more powerful tool or weapon could be used to fight slavery and the slave trade”, Gates asks, “than the written testimony of those who had been enslaved … who, by performing the act of writing, could
