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

Henry Louis Gates

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" 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 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that. "

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

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I have no plans to slow down. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

Looking Forward

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black. "

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

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. "

Henry Louis Gates