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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

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
Novel
Texts
Understand
Cats
Black
Poems
Night
Novels
Nature
Respond
May
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates

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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
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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
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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
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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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My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
Henry Louis Gates
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I have no plans to slow down.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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Instill respect for teachers.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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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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Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Henry Louis Gates
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Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
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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In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.
Henry Louis Gates
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Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Henry Louis Gates
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My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.
Henry Louis Gates
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When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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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
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There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
Henry Louis Gates