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" It's fascinating how life works. "

Henry Louis Gates

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" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school. "

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

" You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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