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" 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

African-American

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" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "

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

" 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

" All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I didn't feel particularly close to my father. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip. "

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

" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "

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

" I'm a tech geek. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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