Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Louis Gates
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American critic Henry Louis Gates.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.'
Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
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.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.
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.
You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.
One must learn how to be black in America.
I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.
I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.
If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.
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.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
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.
If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.
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.
For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
I'm a tech geek.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.
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.
I have no plans to slow down.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
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.
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?
You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
It's fascinating how life works.
Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.
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.
I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.
Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.
Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.
My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
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