“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
“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 earth?”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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
“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
“The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within ‘black community’ by and large.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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
“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 ancestors for example.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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
“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
“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
“My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents… They treated us like adults.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“The African American’s relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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 ancestors for example.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as ‘Tarzan.’”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 this crazy fiction again.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He’s been bridging divisions his whole life.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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
“The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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 earth?”
– Henry Louis Gates
“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