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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
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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
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 have to stop making excuses. One of the things that I'm careful to show is the horrendous effects of institutional and structural racism, but in the end, you can't wait for white man or a Black man to come riding in on a white horse to save you. We have to save ourselves, and that's the lesson of The African Americans.
Henry Louis Gates
I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
Henry Louis Gates
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Henry Louis Gates
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
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
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
If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.
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
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
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
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
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
I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
Henry Louis Gates
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
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
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
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
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
