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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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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
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West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
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
It's fascinating how life works.
Henry Louis Gates
Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
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
But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.
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
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
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
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
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
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
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
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Henry Louis Gates
I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.
Henry Louis Gates
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
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Henry Louis Gates