Comprehensive book explaining a concept new to me and to many non-Black readers, I suspect, of a checkbox that parents of African descent (in the United States, anyway) check if they want their child to be counted as Black in a similar sort of way as a census. Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives a family example and explains the implications for one of his grandchildren, which I think readers should discover for themselves. As Dr. Gates is quick to point out, this affects cases where even though a person of African descent may look white and pass for white, that they will face the challenge to ‘prove’ they are Black, and goes into racial designations as well as hierarchies developed and enforced in America for hundreds of years. Through explaning the further implications of this box-checking and its significance, Dr. Gates also points out that like census records of the past, in many cases, white census poll takers often stripped away the agency from Black families and decided *for* them whether they were Black or ‘colored’ or any number of previous racial designations, or whether they were white. Even though some people might have told them, like the actress Fredi Washington, who passed for white her entire life and could have chosen to live her life as such and to bury her African ancestry but instead chose to identify as a person of color and to fight for equality for African-Americans and to fight for civil rights, that for instance, a census taker would have recorded her as white and possibly gone against her wishes of wanting to be listed as a person of color.

Dr. Gates goes into the other definitions of black box, such as the one on a plane, and ties this to slave slips on the Middle Passage, then to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois.

There’s also the extended metaphor of white supremacy putting Black Americans in a box in many different ways, which leads to a discussion about white Europeans and Americans essentially inventing ‘Blackness’ as an arbitrary category to ‘justify the horror show of Black subjugation.’

The book then goes through famous examples of how Frederick Douglass talked about race as a construct and other thinkers, leading to Colonization Debates.

Further on, the book also goes into the crucial point of remnants of slavery that, although they were best “left behind in the residue of history back on the plantation, and Africa, whose stereotypical portrayals had understandably been absorbed by many African AMericans, having had little if any exposure to images of Africa and Africans that were anything other than a negation of the West and of ‘civilization’ itself, was best left in the jungle.” This then leads into discussions of the lead-up to the Harlem Renaissance and cultural groups such as the New Negroes.

One of the book’s most interesting discussions, that will appeal to American literature and folk tales buffs, for lack of a better term, is the section discussing two very different men — the Black author Charles W. Chesnutt, who passed for white, yet identified as a person of color and fought for Civil Rights of Black Americans, as well as one man I have come to despise since I read about him, the white Joel Chandler Harris, whose “creation” Uncle Remus is a huge part of his theft of West African folk tales and parables that are thousands of years old, particularly those of Brer Rabbit and Anansi. I promised myself I wouldn’t go into a diatribe about Harris and how he learned to become a printer’s apprentice on a plantation and how he overheard the stories of the enslaved people of African descent and, many scholars would argue, stole them (although in saying all of this, I know that there are more complexities to the story and I don’t want to oversimplify it, nor do I want to risk a Joel Chandler Harris scholar coming after me and saying that I’m dead wrong. I have gone based on my readings of his biographical information, all of which indicate a similar origin to how he was suddenly “inspired” to behave as a “benevolt” white savior and rescuer of the West African tales he heard, not thinking in any sort of way that if he profited from the publication of these children’s books (and he did — enoromously), whether he owed any sort of responsibility or gratitude or *acknowledgment* of the enslaved people from whom he had taken the stories without their permission or consent, profiting tremendously from stories and traditions that he white-washed and that were not his for the taking in any way, shape, or form.

He tried to position himself as a cutesie “Look at me, children! I’m doing things like the Beatrix Potter lady!” Right — I promised I would stop going on a diabtribe, didn’t I? On to the rest of the book.

And then, we get into the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most significant periods of the history of American literature, arts, and creativity particularly for the Black figures who were at its center, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and many others.

As a hearkening signal back to my discussion at the start of the review about Fredi Washington, the book discusses the text ‘The Imitation of Life,’ the first film version of which Washington starred in as the disenchanted mixed-race woman, Peola. Although that text is notable for its reinfocement of the tragic mulatto/tress trope, which has proven problamtic over time, it is nonetheless a vital text to study in both its book and visual forms.

Highly recommended, particularly for academic library collection development teams if the title is not already on their radar.