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" 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
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" There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees. "
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" 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. "
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" 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.' "
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" 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? "
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" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "
Henry Louis Gates
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" 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
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" 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
" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "
Henry Louis Gates
Time
Think
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" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "
Henry Louis Gates
Looking
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Time
" 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
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" 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
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Kid
" 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
" Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
History
Lost
" 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
" I'm a tech geek. "
Henry Louis Gates
Tech
Geek
" Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world. "
Henry Louis Gates
Second
World
Nation
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
America
Understand
Very
" 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
" My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker. "
Henry Louis Gates
Man
Look
Made
" 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
" Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro. "
Henry Louis Gates
Values
Generation
Immigrant
" You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. "
Henry Louis Gates
Ship
Tree
You
" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "
Henry Louis Gates
Relationship
Like
Us
" You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. "
Henry Louis Gates
Come
Along
You
" 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
" 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
Relationship
Black
American
" 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
" 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
Vote
Work
Society
" 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
Bridge
Child
Great
" 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