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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
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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
People
Story
Means
Tell
Stories
Change
Nurture
Mean
Protect
Important
Memories
Things
Existence
More quotes by Henry Louis Gates
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
Henry Louis Gates
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
Henry Louis Gates
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
Henry Louis Gates
I think literacy is everything.
Henry Louis Gates
The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
Henry Louis Gates
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
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
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
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
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Henry Louis Gates
I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.
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 thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
I have no plans to slow down.
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
Instill respect for teachers.
Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
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
