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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

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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

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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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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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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
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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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Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.
Henry Louis Gates
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I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, You can like Mozart and ice hockey... - and then I used to say golf, but Tiger took over golf! - and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Henry Louis Gates
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I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
Henry Louis Gates
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If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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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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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The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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I have no plans to slow down.
Henry Louis Gates
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It's fascinating how life works.
Henry Louis Gates
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I think literacy is everything.
Henry Louis Gates
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Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
Henry Louis Gates