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Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Henry Louis Gates
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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
Essayist
Genealogist
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
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Keyser
West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Diversity
White
Black
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Mean
More quotes by Henry Louis Gates
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
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
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
I think literacy is everything.
Henry Louis Gates
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
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
I have no plans to slow down.
Henry Louis Gates
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Henry Louis Gates
In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.
Henry Louis Gates
The genius is making a way out of no way.
Henry Louis Gates
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.
Henry Louis Gates
We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.
Henry Louis Gates
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
Henry Louis Gates
We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.
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
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
Henry Louis Gates
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Henry Louis Gates
In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable.
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
