Henry Louis Gates Quotes
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The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
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One must learn how to be black in America.
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It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
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We have to stop making excuses. One of the things that I'm careful to show is the horrendous effects of institutional and structural racism, but in the end, you can't wait for white man or a Black man to come riding in on a white horse to save you. We have to save ourselves, and that's the lesson of "The African Americans."
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What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
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For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.
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A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.
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Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh.
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I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?
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I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
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The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
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It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
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If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
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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.
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Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.
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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.
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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
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Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.
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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.
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You had one guy who was a slave, and another who wasn't. And I actually know what happened to them. [Juan ] Garrido ended up getting good jobs and a pension in Mexico which was the center of New Spain, as it was called. Esteban ended up being killed by the Zuni Indians.
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Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
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The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
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The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free!
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No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
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My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
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Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
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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 ancestors for example.
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Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
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We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.
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I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
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