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" 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
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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. "
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" 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. "
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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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" One must learn how to be black in America. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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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" 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. "
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People
Know
Long
" 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. "
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Culture
Darkest
People
" 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. "
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You
Used
Take
" Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. "
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Great
Trying
Love
" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "
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Looking
Looking Forward
Time
" 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. "
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Need
History
Black
" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "
Henry Louis Gates
Art
Justice
Censorship
" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "
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Think
Movement
Rights
" 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? "
Henry Louis Gates
American
You
Know
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
End
Bridge
Chance
" People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances. "
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Looking Back
People
Decision
" 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. "
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Black
Learn
White
" 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. "
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Family
DNA
Going
" My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced. "
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Father
First
Genetics
" In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black. "
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Before
Here
Most
" 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. "
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Business
World
Truth Is
" It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art. "
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Great
People
Culture
" 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. "
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Together
Up
Black
" Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President. "
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Other
American
Growth
" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "
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Time
Think
Powerful
" 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. "
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White
Black
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