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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Henry Louis Gates is back with us with his latest book, The Black Box: Writing the Race. Dr. Gates is director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard, the author of more than 20 books now, and creator of so much important great television on PBS, like the Finding Your Roots genealogy series, Reconstruction: After the Civil War, and his latest, The Black Church. The new book continues Dr. Gates' exploration of the role of literature in Black Americans understanding of themselves and the long history in which the white majority has had so much power to define Black Americans identities even to themselves.

Dr. Gates writes the quest for culture and individual identity in the face of such history is a story of ceaseless creativity and reinvention, without which, any attempt to understand America is not just incomplete but absurd.

The book is not a polemic. As he always does so masterfully and elicits from his readers and viewers about ourselves, it is the story of many individual human beings and their relationships to themselves and their place in the world, and from those stories comes the bigger picture. Let's hear some of those stories and some of what's on Henry Louis Gates' mind these days. Again, the book is called The Black Box: Writing the Race. Dr. Gates, it's always an honor and a joy. Welcome back to WNYC.

Henry Louis Gates: Oh, it's so nice to be back on your show. How have you been?

Brian Lehrer: I'm doing okay. Thank you very much. I want to get right to the term in the title, The Black Box. You see it with multiple layers of meaning. Can you begin to explain the meaning to our listeners of The Black Box?

Henry Louis Gates: Well, let me read you an excerpt from the preface that I think will ground our listeners in what my intention was. Does that sound good?

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Henry Louis Gates: My granddaughter, Ellie, was born by C‑section on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2014, after her mother, my older daughter, Maggie, stoically suffered through induced labor for about 24 hours. That evening, my son‑in‑law, Aaron Hatley, came over for a warm hug and a celebratory shot of bourbon-- [laughs] the boy likes bourbon, from my oldest bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve. Pappy Van Winkle--

Brian Lehrer: Brand plug.

Henry Louis Gates: Yes. Pappy Van Winkle costed more than my first two cars. [laughs] I listened to Aaron’s play‑by‑play of the previous day’s events, and after a decent pause, I asked the question that I had wanted to ask all along, "Did you check the box?" I asked, apropos of nothing we had just discussed. Without missing a beat, my good son‑in‑law responded, "Yes, sir. I did." "Very good," I responded, as I poured a second shot of Pappy Van Winkle. 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% sub‑Saharan African and 50 percent European according to the tests offered by commercial DNA companies that I've taken over the last decade and a half. My son‑in‑law is 100% European. Because my daughter is 75% European, her daughter, Ellie, my granddaughter, will test about 87.5% European or white when finally she spits in the test tube.

Legally, at least once upon a time, and if not "legally" any longer, then by convention, practice, and/or volition, 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. I imagine that our conservative Supreme Court, which has already weighed in on the use of such boxes in higher education admissions, will continue to have its eye on them. Because of that arbitrary practice, a brilliant, beautiful little white‑presenting female 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.

Finally, such is the absurdity of the history of race and racial designations in the United States of America, 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'll claim a social identity that reflects the percentage of her ancestors over the last 500 years who were of European descent. 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 sheer, laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America.

Bottom line, the most important thing is that this be her choice.

Brian Lehrer: That this be her choice.

Henry Louis Gates: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: You're the race man grandfather in that story, obviously.

Henry Louis Gates: That's right. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious why-- if she's 87% white, as you describe, and you ended that stretch from your book, citing the arbitrariness of racial assignment. Why was it important for you that they check the box?

Henry Louis Gates: Well, I think because she will be-- her mother was socially constructed as Black, as it were. Though she looks white and though I gave her DNA percentages, she was raised as a Black girl, and they are raising Ellie as a Black child. There are two different kinds of identity we could say or definitions of identity. We could say there is your genetic percentages right over the last 500 years. Then there's how you're socialized, how you're raised. Were you raised Jewish or not, were you raised as Italian or not, were you raised Muslim or not, and in this case, were you raised as an African-American.

Also out of sentiment, I guess, I admit it, I'm an old Black man, [laughs] and I'm trying to keep everybody in the family.

Brian Lehrer: Didn't I read you're only 51% Black?

Henry Louis Gates: Man, I almost had a heart attack. When we started Finding Your Roots, they did my whole family tree in the first series. At the time, I was Chairman of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. They outed me. The Chairman of African and African-American Studies at Harvard was half a white man. I didn't know if I was going to lose my job. [laughs] Was I still entitled to affirmative action? [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Right.

Henry Louis Gates: What it shows though is how mixed we all are, and that's one of the points of my book. You know, Brian, when I test African Americans in Finding Your Roots, and when I trace their ancestors, I always ask them-- all right, at the very end we show their genetic admixture. I said, "Do you have any Native American ancestry?" Every African American I have ever met in my entire life, and that is not an exaggeration, always has a great, great, great grandmother with high cheekbones and straight Black hair [laughs] I go, "Okay. What tribe?" And they go, "Cherokee." I go, "I know that this is not right." I said, "Okay. Turn the page."

The average African-American has 0.8% Native American ancestry, but the average African-American is 24% white. That is astonishing. and the reason is because of slavery, because of rape and cajoled sexuality, by and large, during the horrendous decades and centuries in which our ancestors were enslaved. Rarely do we test any guest who is 100% anything, so the DNA tests deconstruct the racial essentialized notions of race that we inherited from the enlightenment, which is one of my intentions, one of the purposes of Finding Your Roots.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's funny, I guess. Funny is the wrong word, but ironic something that this European and white American definition of race originated in a period that, as you just referred to, was called The Enlightenment.

Henry Louis Gates: Yes. The first Black writers published in the 18th century, The Enlightenment. Precisely at the time when racist notions about who and what an African was were being codified. [clears throat] Some of the greatest Enlightenment philosophers David Hume, Immanuel Kant, in the United States Thomas Jefferson, Hegel, all had racist notions about what an African was. Where they fit and what was called the great chain of being. The great chain of being was this metaphorical construct. Imagine an infinitely long staircase and at the top of the staircase is God. At the bottom are the amoeba or bacteria or whatever.

Right under God on the next stair sits the angels. Right under the angels are four or five categories of "man." Always, Europeans are at the top, then Asians, and then brown people from the subcontinent, and then red people, the Native Americans. Under the Native Americans are the Africans, and under the Africans were apes. There were great debates about whether Africans were the bottom of the scale of humanity or the top of the scale of the animal kingdom. They said, "Well, we need a measurement. What could that measurement be? That measurement was the absence or presence of reason.

How will we measure reason? By the act of writing? Can they write poetry? Can they write creatively?" The first poet Phillis Wheatley who published the first book of poems written by a person of African descent in London on the 1st of September 1773. She was probably the most famous Black person in the world because of the publication of that book because so many people wrote about her book to see what it signified about the native intelligence, and therefore the nature of the being of the person of African descent.

Some people said, "Wow, Phillis Wheatley's poetry proves that Africans have the capacity to take three giant steps up the great chain of being, the capacity to improve." It was called perfectability. Other people like Thomas Jefferson said, "Famously, that the poetry published under her name suggesting that maybe she had assistance in writing them are beneath the dignity of criticism."

Brian Lehrer: There's even Voltaire, and Voltaire we should say, I know from your book was an example of those who saw it as proof or evidence that a Black person could do more than he thought intellectually. Is even that a form of prejudice like generalizing about Black people's abilities from one writer's work? Is it like if I see Shohei Ohtani hit a home run and I say, "Oh, Japanese people are good at baseball"?

Henry Louis Gates: [laughs] Yes it is, but that is the prison house that I think that many minorities have been caged in, if you think about it. We call it a race relationship between part and whole. That Phillis Wheatley stood for all the Black people in the whole wide world. When I was growing up, this manifested itself in all kind of curious forms, that if a Black person committed a crime, then that was what was called an embarrassment to the race. I love to swim and my brother and I would go to the swimming pool in Piedmont West Virginia.

Now, Piedmont, West Virginia is an Irish Italian paper mill town halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington. All my families, it turns out, on all sides lived in this 30-mile radius from where I was born for the last 200 years. You don't think about the Allegheny Mountains as being this hotbed of Black culture, but that's where my people are from. Now, schools integrated, overwhelmingly white in other words. Schools integrated in our county in 1955 a year after Brown v. Board with no Rosa Parks, no Martin Luther King, the white people just voted whatever body determined that, they just voted to do it.

in 1956 I started at the white school's, Black people call it. In 1957, they integrated the swimming pool. They had to think about that because of all that semi-nudity and people were uncomfortable about what could ensue. Every day in the summer I go to the swimming pool and my mother packed in my little kit, Avon moisturizing cream. You know why?

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Henry Louis Gates: Because if you have brown skin, and you get out of the pool, and your skin dries, it gets ashy. Dry skin appears and with a brown background, you could see the white scaliness quite clearly. She would say, and as you know and as everybody knows, my mother named me "Skip" even before I was born. She would say, "Skippy, when you get out of the swimming pool, you dry off and then put on Avon moisturizing cream, because you cannot look ashy in front of white people, that would embarrass the race."

Brian Lehrer: Race, wow.

Henry Louis Gates: When Mike Tyson got in trouble, I remember, with one of his girlfriends, I heard people saying, "That's so embarrassing to our people." The OJE thing, over, and over, and over again. It was called the politics of respectability. It's defined by my wonderful colleague at Harvard, the great historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. It was a conscious ideology that was developed primarily by Black feminists in what was called Women's era in the 1890s that we had to comport ourselves with great dignity in public.

We could never go out, dress casually. The men had to wear suits. The women had to be dressed like going to church because we had to disappoint expectations. We had to disappoint stereotypes. So many stereotypes have been heaped on Black people. That we were stupid, ugly, dirty, that we smelled bad, that we were lascivious. Women particularly had to comport themselves with great propriety. This is reflected in African American literature. Nobody makes love in African American literature, until basically, Zora Neale Hurston writes one of the most brilliant novels ever written in any tradition, Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.

It's about Janie the protagonist, who discovers her own sexuality and acts her sexuality. Man, you could not do that, and that was controversial when she did it. I talk about Richard Wright's reaction to Hurston's novel. He said that she was trying to appeal to the puritan interests of white men and white male readers. She writes back and says, "Richard Wright doesn't know what he's talking about." This politics of respectability has a deep history going back, ironically, to what the absence and presence of art and literature implies, about who and what a Black person is on the great chain of being. That, Brian, is a hell of a lot of pressure to put on an artist, a painter, or a sculptor.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. My guest, if you're just joining us, is Dr. Henry Louis Gates. His new book is called The Black Box: Writing the Race. Several people are calling in to ask you a question or to say something in reaction to what you've been saying. 212-433 WNYC. Fatimah in Manhattan you're on WNYC with Dr. Gates, Hello Fatima.

Fatima: Hi happy to be here. I have called in a few times and when I was at the Kennedy School at Harvard unfortunately I didn't have a chance to take a class with you, Professor Gates.

Henry Louis Gates: My loss, my loss.

[laughter]

Fatimah: But took plenty of great classes at Harvard. I wanted to say this because you were commenting about the birth of your granddaughter who's light-skinned and light-presenting, and I myself am very light-skinned, light-presenting. There are plenty of times that people will say to me because I look so white, "Well, you don't have to claim that you are Black." Which I personally find very offensive, because to me when people say that it's a rejection of my history, my lineage, my culture.

Unlike your granddaughter, both of my parents are Black. All four of my grandparents are Black. We have white people mixing with white people, and some of that white got into the-- is the product of non-consensual rape by enslavers.

Henry Louis Gates: Sure.

Fatimah: I find it very interesting talking about that as we think about race as a social construct in America, and I wrote a book which I expected this was going to happen. I wrote a book that recently came out called Race Rules: What Your Black Friend Won't Tell You. I knew that when I came out with this book, a lot of people were going to say, "Oh, is she even Black?" The commentary that I get comparing me to Rachel Dolezal and the like, that is the path that your granddaughter will be going through.

To me, thinking about what you said, for me it's about acknowledging who I am, how I've lived in this world, and I see myself as a Black person. I hope for your granddaughter, when we talk about a choice, that she will fully embrace her Blackness. I'll just say this one other thing. I watch Finding Your Roots all the time. I love that show, and I just can't wait for you to have regular people on it. Or I want to get known enough just so that one day I'll be picked to be one of the people, because I can trace my white ancestors being in this country for 400 years, but it's so hard to trace the Black ones. I look forward to the day when regular folk can be researched on your show. Thank you for the work that you do.

Henry Louis Gates: Oh, thank you. You make me so sorry that we didn't have a chance to exchange ideas weekly over the course of a semester at Harvard. I'll be going to get a copy of your book. I'll tell you what, we'll exchange. You write me @gates@harvard.edu. You give me your address and I'll send you my book if you send me yours. Deal?

Brian Lehrer: Fatimah, still there?

Fatimah: I'll do it right now.

Henry Louis Gates: Okay, great.

Brian Lehrer: That's great.

Fatimah: I'm still here. I will do it.

Henry Louis Gates: Okay, great. Now, first of all, I love the title of your book. Anthony Appiah is my best friend. Kwame Anthony Appiah, the great philosopher. Many of you know him because he writes the Ethicist column in the Sunday Times Magazine.

Brian Lehrer: He's been on the show.

Henry Louis Gates: Will be on again, I'm sure. A prolific person. One of the few true geniuses that I know. Anthony and I met at the University of Cambridge where I was a graduate student. He was an undergraduate, then he got a PhD. He's the first African to get a PhD in philosophy in the 800 years of the University of Cambridge. He's a bad brother. [chuckles] Anthony's mother's English, Peggy Cripps, and Anthony's father, Joe Appiah, is a Ghanaian. And I was struck even in 1973 when we met. Anthony, he's racially indetermined. He's brown, but you don't know where he is from.

He could be from India, he could be from Sri Lanka. He could be from Latin America. You just don't know. People would often ask him. Now that's politically incorrect. I get away with it because I have a show on DNA, so I can ask him with impunity. He would say, "My mother is English and my father is African." I was stunned the first time that I heard that, because we'd come out of this period in America-- I was at Yale from '69 to '73 when racial categories, racial identity was so contentious. Who you were implied so much about your politics, what you looked like. Did you have an afro 2 feet tall?

Were you were in dashikis? Did you learn how to speak Swahili? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I thought, "Wow, what a simple, straightforward, honest answer." I hope Ellie will say, "My mother identified as Black, and my father identified as White." Then move on with her life. I want it to be her choice. Going back to your first question, we had-- "We" meaning the Black people, my generation, fought so hard to keep people from passing. That passing was the worst sin that a Black person could do, because they were denying their cultural heritage.

They were denying their mother and father. They were denying their grandparents. They were denying this marvelous world that we created in the Black box. The Black box is where White races put all Black people. When we got off the boats from Africa, we were put in the metaphorical Black box of Black culture. WEB Du Bois famously said that it was life behind the veil. The metaphor of the Black box works so well because with the Black box, you could see the inputs, you could see the outputs, but you can't tell what's going on inside.

The White world, though they put us in this box and filled it with stereotypes about who and what we supposedly were, could not see who we really were as people. We could see them through the veil, but they couldn't see us. Within that box, people strove to create one of the world's truly great cultures, the spirituals, the blues, Ragtime, Jazz, R&B, Soul, just to name a few musical genres, not to mention gospel and great modes of oratory and preaching styles, and 10,001 other things that mark the genius of Black culture. It's so hard in the world to be Black.

God knows it was hard in the world to be Black in the 18th and the 19th and the early 20th century, much harder than it is today, because of the imposition of Jim Crow and the reign of white supremacy, that running away from that seemed like the ultimate act of betrayal. One of the most famous movies ever done about passing is called Imitation of Life. Imitation of Life is a melodrama, it's a morality tale. When Peola runs away from her mother, Delilah, who is the prototypical figure for Aunt Jemima, passes for white, breaks her mother's heart. The last scene in the movie is Delilah's funeral.

She only wanted enough money to have a New Orleans-style funeral. Peola comes back and runs over to the casket and throws herself on the casket and says, "I broke my mother's heart. I'm sorry, mama. I'm sorry, mama." When we were watching that, we were kids, I would run over to my mother cry. I say, "Mama, I'll never pass. Mama, I love you, mama." [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Important story.

Henry Louis Gates: I'm going to be Black the rest of my life. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: We just have about a minute and a half left. I want to acknowledge that a number of people from different backgrounds are picking up on your respectability politics reference and writing their own stories. Listener writes, "My dad was one of the early immigrants from India in 1960. The only one around him in New York and Boston, and this is how he lived and raised us. He would dress immaculately every day and told us we have to dress, speak well, behave well because everybody, the white majority were judging everything we did and every one of us represented the entirety of the Indian diaspora."

Henry Louis Gates: That's it.

Brian Lehrer: Other people are writing from other backgrounds with the same story. In our last minute. The stories are wonderful and we could go on for so long, and we didn't even scratch the surface of all the writers who you tell the stories of in this book. It's a lot about literature. I want to close with a political question, because the press release with your book suggests that even though this is primarily a work of literary history, it connects to the need to protect the free exchange of ideas in the classroom today.

I've read, and I don't even know if it's in the book, it wasn't in the parts that I read, but that even you, Henry Louis Gates, have had some of your writing banned from students' eyes in Florida under Governor DeSantis' rules. Would you make that connection in our last minute?

Henry Louis Gates: Oh, yes. In fact, the very last chapter of this book is a response to Governor DeSantis. I have been told that an essay of mine has been banned in Florida and another one in Texas. I find that crushing. Censorship to me is to art as lynching is to justice. We have to fight for the right of free expression, left, right and center. One of the reasons that I wrote this book, Brian, is that I hate bullies. When I was at Yale, there were all kind of ideological bullies trying to tell you how to be Black. Whether it's the Black Panther, it's the Black Muslims, Black cultural nationalists.

I swore if I ever got in a position of power, I was going to protect the right of free speech, the right of identity for all my students, Black students but also the white students. I am at Harvard. I fight for freedom of expression for people on the right, people in the center, and people on the left. I hate censorship. I hate ideologues. I hate people who don't celebrate the glorious free exchange of ideas. That's what knowledge acquisition is, that's what learning is at its best. I am Henry Louis Gates Jr. got to go to my grave as an ardent and passionate defender of the right of free expression.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Henry Louis Gates is director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard. You know his PBS work and his new book is called The Black Box: Writing the Race. What an honor to have you share it with us. Great conversation. Thank you so very much.

Henry Louis Gates: Thank you, my brother.

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