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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.'

Henry Louis Gates

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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
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West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates

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I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, Did you see what that Negro did? A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
Henry Louis Gates
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The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
Henry Louis Gates
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In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
Henry Louis Gates
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My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
Henry Louis Gates
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Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Henry Louis Gates
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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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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
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Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Henry Louis Gates
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My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
Henry Louis Gates
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Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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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
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The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
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My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
Henry Louis Gates
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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.
Henry Louis Gates
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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