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I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Henry Louis Gates
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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
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Henry Louis Gates
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More quotes by 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
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
Henry Louis Gates
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
Henry Louis Gates
We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
Henry Louis Gates
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Henry Louis Gates
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Henry Louis Gates
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.
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
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
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
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
You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know?
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
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
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
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
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
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
A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.
Henry Louis Gates
The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
Henry Louis Gates
