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" 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
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" Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. "
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" One must learn how to be black in America. "
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" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "
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" 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. "
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" There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees. "
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" Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. "
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" I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are. "
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" 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? "
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" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "
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" The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. "
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Right
Working Hard
Poverty
" What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. "
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Kid
" The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. "
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" Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. "
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Poor
" The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. "
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" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "
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Want
" 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. "
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Life
Black
History
" Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature. "
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Remember
English
Literature
" 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. "
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Opportunities
Ending
Black
" 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'm a tech geek. "
Henry Louis Gates
Tech
Geek
" 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
God
Mom
Rest
" 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. "
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Racism
Breathing
Become
" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "
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Think
Movement
Rights
" 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? "
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Children
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Truth
" 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. "
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Family
DNA
Going
" 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. "
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System
Black
Right
" 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. "
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End
Bridge
Chance
" 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. "
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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. "
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Experience
Trees
Tree
" Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. "
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Great
Trying
Love