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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. "

Henry Louis Gates

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" My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.' "

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

" It's fascinating how life works. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black? "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. "

Henry Louis Gates

African-American

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. "

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

" I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are. "

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

" Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature. "

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

" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Diversity doesn't mean black and white only. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. "

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

" My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "

Henry Louis Gates

Looking Forward

" 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

" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "

Henry Louis Gates