Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "
Henry Louis Gates
Looking
Looking Forward
Time
Related Quotes:
" Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "
Henry Louis Gates
Does
Suffering
Necessarily
" I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Tiger
You
Speech
" 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
White
Black
Class
" My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. "
Henry Louis Gates
Goal
Family
Tree
" 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.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Diversity
More
Like
" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "
Henry Louis Gates
Art
Justice
Censorship
" 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
Leader
People
Look
" 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? "
Henry Louis Gates
Me
Race
Rebel
" 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
American
Army
Revolution
" The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. "
Henry Louis Gates
Reason
Africa
Black
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
System
Black
Right
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
You
Well
" There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months. "
Henry Louis Gates
You
Used
Take
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Family
DNA
Going
" 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
New
Myself
Black
" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "
Henry Louis Gates
I Am
Father
Everything
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Bridge
Child
Great
" Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president. "
Henry Louis Gates
Together
Up
Black
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Racism
Breathing
Become
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Drop
Black
America
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Need
History
Black
" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "
Henry Louis Gates
Prison
Think
Want
" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "
Henry Louis Gates
Think
Movement
Rights
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Trade
Black
City
" 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
Queen
Thought
Movies
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Ruined
Real
Past
" 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
Opportunities
Ending
Black
" 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
America
Understand
Very
" What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. "
Henry Louis Gates
Way
Me
Kid
" 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