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" First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager. "

Henry Louis Gates

Revolution

Community

Black

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" In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. "

" 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. "

" Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "

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

" You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Henry Louis Gates

Particularly

Feel

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. "

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

Henry Louis Gates

Relationship

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