Henry Louis Gates
Quotations
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“People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“Let’s face it – think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the…
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“The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It’s had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white…
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“The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents… They treated us like adults.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It’s had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white…
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“Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as ‘Tarzan’ and in programs such as ‘Ramar of the Jungle’ and ‘Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.’” -Henry Louis Gates
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“My mom, God rest her soul – she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?” -Henry Louis Gates
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“We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about…
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“Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“Let’s face it – think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the…
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“People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and… Wanda Sykes and John Legend… we’re adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that’s the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and… Wanda Sykes and John Legend… we’re adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that’s the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you’re willing to stand up within the group and say, ‘It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,’ or ‘It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,’ it’s crucial to say that.”…
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“We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.” -Henry Louis Gates
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I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his…
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