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In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
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
Writer
Keyser
West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Makes
America
Ancestry
Drop
Black
More quotes by 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
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Henry Louis Gates
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
Henry Louis Gates
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
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
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Henry Louis Gates
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
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
The genius is making a way out of no way.
Henry Louis Gates
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
Henry Louis Gates
People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.
Henry Louis Gates
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
Instill respect for teachers.
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
I have no plans to slow down.
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
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
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
My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.
Henry Louis Gates
