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" My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. "
Henry Louis Gates
Goal
Family
Tree
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" I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Black
Because
People
" 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
Looking Back
People
Decision
" 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
" Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans. "
Henry Louis Gates
Destination
Mirror
Miami
" Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. "
Henry Louis Gates
Will
Problems
Poor
" Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same. "
Henry Louis Gates
Roots
Ancestry
Same
" I didn't feel particularly close to my father. "
Henry Louis Gates
Particularly
Close
Feel
" 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
Diversity
People
Remember
" 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
" 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
" The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? "
Henry Louis Gates
Children
Truth Is
Truth
" The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. "
Henry Louis Gates
You
Black
History
" 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
" 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
People
Age
Black
" 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
" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "
Henry Louis Gates
Art
Justice
Censorship
" The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. "
Henry Louis Gates
Line
Tree
African-American
" 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
Experience
Trees
Tree
" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "
Henry Louis Gates
Relationship
Like
Us
" The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
Live
Hope
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Community
City
Attitude
" 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
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
You
Society
Identity
" Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth? "
Henry Louis Gates
Day
War
Think
" There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees. "
Henry Louis Gates
Family
Trees
Stories
" 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
Culture
Darkest
People
" 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
Business
World
Truth Is
" I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. "
Henry Louis Gates
Been
Appreciated
I Think
" You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. "
Henry Louis Gates
Come
Along
You
" 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
Culture
Want
Black