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" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

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" It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. "

Henry Louis Gates

" What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. "

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

" The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. "

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

" One must learn how to be black in America. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "

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

" If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

" One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "

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

" My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker. "

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

" Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I'm a tech geek. "

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

" I didn't feel particularly close to my father. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. "

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

" So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. "

Henry Louis Gates