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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
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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
Essayist
Genealogist
Historian
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Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
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Keyser
West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Stories
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More quotes by 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
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
Henry Louis Gates
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Henry Louis Gates
I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
Henry Louis Gates
I got a letter from this lady of Russian and Jewish descent. She asked me if I was a racist because I didn't do any White people. I was shocked, because my mandate is to do Black studies. It would have never occurred to me if this lady hadn't written this letter. We decided we were going expand the brand and do everybody.
Henry Louis Gates
It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
Henry Louis Gates
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
Henry Louis Gates
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
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?
Henry Louis Gates
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.
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
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.
Henry Louis Gates
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
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Henry Louis Gates
So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.
Henry Louis Gates
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
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Henry Louis Gates
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
Henry Louis Gates
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
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
