It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc,

Henry Loey's It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Henry Lewis 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, right, 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.

But 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's 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.

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