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" The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. "
Henry Louis Gates
Right
Working Hard
Poverty
Related Quotes:
" 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
People
You
Well
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Together
Up
Black
" 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
" 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
" 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
Class
New
Black
" 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
" 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
Small
You
Historians
" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "
Henry Louis Gates
I Am
Father
Everything
" Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "
Henry Louis Gates
Does
Suffering
Necessarily
" 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
Poverty
King
Day
" 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
" 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
Black
Security
School
" The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. "
Henry Louis Gates
Reason
Africa
Black
" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "
Henry Louis Gates
Art
Justice
Censorship
" 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
Queen
Thought
Movies
" 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
She
American
Queen
" 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
Leader
People
Look
" It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
Surprise
Together
" 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
People
Black
Patriotism
" 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
Need
History
Black
" Diversity doesn't mean black and white only. "
Henry Louis Gates
White
Diversity
Black
" 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
" I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Diversity
More
Like
" 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
World
You
Past
" I have no plans to slow down. "
Henry Louis Gates
Slow
Down
Plans
" I didn't feel particularly close to my father. "
Henry Louis Gates
Particularly
Close
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Before
Here
Most